Quotes from Daniel Gilbert

We cannot feel good about an imaginary future when we are busy feeling bad about an actual present.

WHAT WOULD YOU DO right now if you learned that you were going to die in ten minutes?

but of all the things you might do in your final ten minutes, it's a pretty safe bet that few of them are things you actually did today.

We think about the future in a way that no other animal can, does, or ever has, and this simple, ubiquitous, ordinary act is a defining feature of our humanity.

The greatest achievement of the human brain is its ability to imagine objects and episodes that do not exist in the realm of the real, and it is this ability that allows us to think about the future.

Best offense is the one that fails to trigger the best defense.

Just as an abacus can put two and two together to produce four without having thoughts about arithmetic, so brains can add past to present to make future without ever thinking about any of them.

It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question."14

When we have an experience—hearing a particular sonata, making love with a particular person, watching the sun set from a particular window of a particular room—on successive occasions, we quickly begin to adapt to it, and the experience yields less pleasure each time. Psychologists call this habituation, economists call it declining marginal utility, and the rest of us call it marriage.

All men seek happiness. This is without exception. Whatever different means they employ, they all tend to this end. The cause of some going to war, and of others avoiding it, is the same desire in both, attended with different views. The will never takes the least step but to this object. This is the motive of every action of every man, even of those who hang themselves.12 Feeling

My friends tell me that I have a tendency to point out problems without offering solutions, but they never tell me what I should do about it.

Our brain accepts what the eyes see and our eye looks for whatever our brain wants.

The fact that we often judge the pleasure of an experience by its ending can cause us to make some curious choices.

If you are like most people, then like most people, you don't know you're like most people.

Psychologists call this habituation, economists call it declining marginal utility, and the rest of us call it marriage.

Our inability to recall how we really felt is why our wealth of experiences turns out to be poverty of riches.

Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they're finished.

Impact is rewarding. Mattering makes us happy.

Research suggests that people are typically unaware of the reasons why they are doing what they are doing, but when asked for a reason, they readily supply one.

Most of us appear to believe that we are more athletic, intelligent, organized, ethical, logical, interesting, open-minded, and healthy-not to mention more attractive-than the average person.

If someone offered you a pill that would make you permanently happy, you would be well advised to run fast and run far. Emotion is a compass that tells us what to do, and a compass that perpetually stuck on north is worthless.

In short, we derive support for our preferred conclusions by listening to the words that we put in the mouths of people who have already been preselected for their willingness to say what we want to hear.

Each of us is trapped in a place, a time and a circumstance and our attempt to use our mind to transcend those boundaries are more often than not ineffective.

Perhaps the strangest thing about this illusion of control is not that it happens but that it seems to confer many of the psychological benefits of genuine control. In fact, the one group of people who seem generally immune to this illusion are the clinically depressed, who tend to estimate accurately the degree to which they can control events in most situation.