Daniel M. Gilbert Quotes & Sayings

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 stop it. The majority of people on this planet, they're overwhelmed with concerns about their immediate well being. — Daniel M. Gilbert

Within a couple of weeks even earthquake survivors return to their normal level of unfounded optimism. — Daniel M. Gilbert

fear, worry, and anxiety have useful roles to play in our lives. — Daniel M. Gilbert

Beyond the satiation level of income, you can buy more pleasurable experiences, but you will lose some of your ability to enjoy the less expensive ones. — Daniel M. Gilbert

we sometimes imagine dark futures just to scare our own pants off. — Daniel M. Gilbert

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. — Daniel M. Gilbert

As soon as our potential experience becomes our actual experience - as soon as we have a stake in its goodness - our brains get busy looking for ways to think about the experience that will allow us to appreciate it. — Daniel M. Gilbert

People want to be happy, and all the other things they want are typically meant to be a means to that end. — Daniel M. 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 M. 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 ... But our temporal progeny are often thankless. We toil and sweat to give them just what we think they will like, and they quit their jobs, grow their hair, move to or from San Francisco, and wonder how we could ever have been stupid enough to think they'd like that. We fail to achieve the accolades and rewards that we consider crucial to their well-being, and they end up thanking God that things didn't work out according to our shortsighted, misguided plan. — Daniel M. Gilbert

Forestalling pleasure is an inventive technique for getting double — Daniel M. Gilbert

We live in a world in which people are censured, demoted, imprisoned, beheaded, simply because they have opened their mouths, flapped their lips, and vibrated some air. Yes, those vibrations can make us feel sad or stupid or alienated. Tough shit. That's the price of admission to the marketplace of ideas. 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 M. Gilbert

As the philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote, 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 know only their own side of the question. — Daniel M. Gilbert

Small children cannot say what they want to be later because they don't really understand what later means. — Daniel M. Gilbert

One cannot divine nor forecast the conditions that will make happiness; one only stumbles upon them by chance, in a lucky hour, at the world's end somewhere, and holds fast to the days, as to fortune or fame. — Daniel M. Gilbert

When we imagine future circumstances, we fill in details that won't really come to pass and leave out details that will. When we imagine future feelings, we find it impossible to ignore what we are feeling now and impossible to recognize how we will think about the things that happen later. — Daniel M. Gilbert

So what motivates people to work hard every day to do things that will satisfy the economy's needs but not their own? Like so many thinkers, Smith believed that people want just one thing - happiness - hence economies can blossom and grow only if people are deluded into believing that the production of wealth will make them happy.14 If and only if people hold this false belief will they do enough producing, procuring, and consuming to sustain their economies. — Daniel M. Gilbert

The average newspaper boy in Pittsburgh knows more about the universe than did Galileo, Aristotle, Leonardo, or any of those other guys who were so smart they only needed one name. — Daniel M. Gilbert

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. — Daniel M. Gilbert

Impact is rewarding. Mattering makes us happy. — Daniel M. Gilbert

Now, some people will bemoan this fact, wag their fingers in your direction, and tell you sternly that you should live every minute of your life as though it were your last, which only goes to show that some people would spend their final ten minutes giving other people dumb advice. The — Daniel M. Gilbert

The reality of the moment is so palpable and powerful that it holds imagination in a tight orbit from which it never fully escapes. — Daniel M. Gilbert

The fact is that human beings come into the world with a passion for control, they go out of the world the same way, and research suggests that if they lose their ability to control things at any point between their entrance and their exit, they become unhappy, helpless, hopeless, and depressed.40 And occasionally dead. — Daniel M. Gilbert

When a fruit salad, a lover, or a jazz trio is just too imperfect for our tastes, we stop eating, kissing, and listening. But the law of large numbers suggests that when a measurement is too imperfect for our tastes, we should not stop measuring. Quite the opposite - we should measure again and again until niggling imperfections yield to the onslaught of data. — Daniel M. Gilbert

the feeling of control - whether real or illusory - is one of the wellsprings of mental health. — Daniel M. Gilbert

The brain and the eye may have a contractual relationship in which the brain has agreed to believe what they eye sees, but in return the eye has agreed to look for what the brain wants. — Daniel M. Gilbert

Arthritic toothless people who love orgasms are more likely to reproduce than are limber, toothy people who do not. — Daniel M. Gilbert

The belief-transmission network of which we are a part cannot operate without a continuously replenished supply of people to do the transmitting, thus the belief that children are a source of happiness becomes a part of our cultural wisdom simply because the opposite belief unravels the fabric of any society that holds it. — Daniel M. 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 M. Gilbert

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

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. — Daniel M. Gilbert

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. — Daniel M. Gilbert

As students of the silver screen recall, Bogart's admonition about future regret led Bergman to board the plane and fly away with her husband. Had she stayed with Bogey in Casablanca, she would probably have felt just fine. Not right away, perhaps, but soon, and for the rest of her life. — Daniel M. Gilbert

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

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. — Daniel M. 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 M. Gilbert

Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they're finished. — Daniel M. Gilbert

anticipating unpleasant events can minimize their impact. — Daniel M. Gilbert

If you are like most people, then like most people, you don't know you're like most people. — Daniel M. Gilbert

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. — Daniel M. Gilbert

Despite the third word of the title, this is not an instruction manual that will tell you anything useful about how to be happy. Those books are located in the self-help section two aisles over, and once you've bought one, done everything it says to do, and found yourself miserable anyway, you can always come back here to understand why. — Daniel M. Gilbert

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 game has already been played precludes the possibility that our cheering will somehow penetrate the television, travel through the cable system, find its way to the stadium, and influence the trajectory of the ball as it hurtles toward the goalposts! — Daniel M. Gilbert

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

Our brain accepts what the eyes see and our eye looks for whatever our brain wants. — Daniel M. Gilbert

Imagination cannot easily transcend the boundaries of the present, and one reason for this is that it must borrow machinery that is owned by perception. The fact that these two processes must run on the same platform means that we are sometimes confused about which one is running. We assume that what we feel as we imagine the future is what we'll feel when we get there, but in fact, what we feel as we imagine the future is often a response to what's happening in the present. — Daniel M. Gilbert

Economies thrive when individuals strive, but because individuals will only strive for their own happiness, it is essential that they mistakenly believe that producing and consuming are routes to personal well-being. — Daniel M. Gilbert

The human being is the only animal that thinks about the future. — Daniel M. Gilbert

The things we do when we expect our lives to continue are naturally and properly different than the things we might do if we expected them to end abruptly. We go easy on the lard and tobacco, smile dutifully at yet another of our supervisor's witless jokes, read books like this one when we could be wearing paper hats and eating pistachio macaroons in the bathtub, and we do each of these things in the charitable service of the people we will soon become. — Daniel M. Gilbert

Among life's cruellest truths is this one: wonderful things are especially wonderful the first time they happen, but their wonderfulness wanes with repetition. — Daniel M. Gilbert

What is the conceptual tie that binds anxiety and planning? Both, of course, are intimately connected to thinking about the future. — Daniel M. Gilbert