Daniel Gilbert Quotes

56 quotes in 958 categories

• The word happiness is used to indicate at least three related things, which we might roughly call emotional happiness, moral happiness, and judgmental happiness.
• Happiness refers to feelings, virtue refers to actions, and those actions can cause those feelings. But not necessarily and not exclusively.
• Because your brain uses information from the areas around the blind spot to make a reasonable guess about what the blind spot would see if…
• The good news is that going blind is not going to make you as unhappy as you think it will. The bad news is that…
• The eye and brain are conspirators, and, like most conspiracies, theirs is negotiated behind closed doors, in the back room, outside of our awareness.
• What’s so curious about human beings is that we can look deeply into the future, foresee disaster, and still do nothing in the present to…
• Why isn’t it fun to watch a videotape of last night’s football game even when we don’t know who won? Because the fact that the…
• 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…
• People want to be happy, and all the other things they want are typically meant to be a means to that end.
• We are happy when we have family, we are happy when we have friends and almost all the other things we think make us happy…
• Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they're finished.
• When we have an experience -- hearing a particular sonata, making love with a particular person, watching the sun set from a particular window of…
• We treat our future selves as though they were our children, spending most of the hours of most of our days constructing tomorrows that we…
• In short, if we adhere to the standard of perfection in all our endeavors, we are left with nothing but mathematics and the White Album.
• Your mistake was not in imagining things you could not know—that is, after all, what imagination is for. Rather, your mistake was in unthinkingly treating…
• Alas, we think of ourselves as unique entities-minds unlike any others-and thus we often reject the lessons that the emotional experience of others has to…
• Everyone who has observed human behavior for more than thirty continuous seconds seems to have noticed that people are strongly, perhaps even primarily, perhaps even…
• Perceptions are portraits, not photographs, and their form reveals the artist’s hand every bit as much as it reflects the things portrayed
• Hateful, blasphemous, prejudiced, vulgar, rude, or ignorant remarks are the music of a free society, and the relentless patter of idiots is how we know…
• We humans can look deep into future and predict what will happen, but then turn around and do nothing about it.

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