Daniel Gilbert Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished. The person you are right now is as transient, as fleeting and as temporary as all the people you’re ever been. The one constant in our lives is change.”
-- Daniel Gilbert -
“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.”
-- Daniel Gilbert -
“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 what you imagined as though it were an accurate representation of the facts.”
-- Daniel Gilbert -
“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 are actually just ways of getting more family and friends.”
-- Daniel Gilbert -
“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're in one. When all the words in our public conversation are fair, good, and true, it's time to make a run for the fence.”
-- Daniel Gilbert -
“The brain and the eye may have a contractual relationship in which the brain has agreed to believe what the eye sees, but in return the eye has agreed to look for what the brain wants.”
-- Daniel Gilbert -
“To ensure that our views are credible, our brain accepts what our eye sees. To ensure that our views are positive, our eye looks for what our brain wants. The conspiracy between these two servants allows us to live at the fulcrum of stark reality and comforting illusion.”
-- Daniel Gilbert -
“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.”
-- Daniel Gilbert -
“Our brain accepts what the eyes see and our eye looks for whatever our brain wants.”
-- Daniel Gilbert -
“If you are like most people, then like most people, you don't know you're like most people.”
-- Daniel Gilbert -
“Impact is rewarding. Mattering makes us happy.”
-- Daniel Gilbert -
“Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they're finished.”
-- Daniel Gilbert -
“The fact that we often judge the pleasure of an experience by its ending can cause us to make some curious choices.”
-- Daniel Gilbert -
“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 hope will make them happy”
-- Daniel Gilbert -
“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 winning the lottery will not make you as happy as you expect.”
-- Daniel Gilbert -
“Daniel Levitin has more insights per page than any other neuroscientist I know. The organized Mind is smart, important, and, as always, exquisitely written.”
-- Daniel Gilbert -
“We don't believe other people's experiences can tell us all that much about our own. I think this is an illusion of uniqueness.”
-- Daniel Gilbert -
“Variety improves the things that we do too often, but it rules the things that we don't do often enough.”
-- Daniel Gilbert -
“The data says that with the poor, a little money can buy a lot of happiness. If you're rich, a lot of money can buy you a little more happiness. But in both cases, money does it.”
-- Daniel Gilbert -
“The truth is, bad things don't affect us as profoundly as we expect them to. That's true of good things, too. We adapt very quickly to either.”
-- Daniel Gilbert -
“Part of us believes the new car is better because it lasts longer. But, in fact, that's the worst thing about the new car. It will stay around to disappoint you, whereas a trip to Europe is over. It evaporates. It has the good sense to go away, and you are left with nothing but a wonderful memory.”
-- Daniel Gilbert -
“Lower your cortisol level. The happiest people have the lowest level of cortisol, a stress hormone that raises blood pressure and weakens the immune system. Cut the stress-more yoga, less road rage-and you'll cut your cortisol production.”
-- Daniel Gilbert -
“Few of us can accurately gauge how we will feel tomorrow or next week. That's why when you go to the supermarket on an empty stomach, you'll buy too much, and if you shop after a big meal, you'll buy too little.”
-- Daniel Gilbert -
“Global warming is a deadly threat precisely because it fails to trip the brain's alarm, leaving us soundly asleep in a burning bed...”
-- Daniel Gilbert -
“Reality' is a movie generated by our brains. Because we don't realize this, we are far too confident that the stuff appearing in the movie is actually 'out there' in the world when, in fact, it's not.”
-- Daniel Gilbert -
“Is happiness really the only thing we should be aiming for?”
-- Daniel Gilbert -
“The price we pay for our irresponsible explanatory urge is that we often spoil our most pleasant experiences by making good sense of them.”
-- Daniel Gilbert -
“To learn from experience, we must remember it, and, for a variety of reasons, memory is a faithless friend.”
-- Daniel Gilbert -
“We all have direct experience with things that do or don't make us happy, we all have friends, therapists, cabdrivers, and talk-show hosts who tell us about things that will or won't make us happy, and yet, despite all this practice and all this coaching, our search for happiness often culminates in a stinky mess. We expect the next car, the next house, or the next promotion to make us happy even though the last ones didn't and even though others keep telling us that the next ones won't.”
-- Daniel Gilbert -
“People are drastically overconfident about their judgments of others.”
-- Daniel Gilbert