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People want to be happy, and all the other things they want are typically meant to be a means to that end.

Daniel Gilbert

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Daniel Gilbert
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: November 5
Psychologist
University Teacher
Writer
the United States of America
Dan Gilbert
Daniel Todd Gilbert
Meant
Happy
Means
Ends
Mean
Things
People
Typically

More quotes by Daniel Gilbert

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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.
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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.
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Humans react to danger when it is immediate, immoral, visible... Global warming does not press any of those buttons.
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Psychologists call this habituation, economists call it declining marginal utility, and the rest of us call it marriage.
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Our brain accepts what the eyes see and our eye looks for whatever our brain wants.
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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.
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Our inability to recall how we really felt is why our wealth of experiences turns out to be poverty of riches.
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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
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I have everything that I could possibly want in life, from a gorgeous granddaughter and a wonderful wife, brilliant students, the best job anyone could hope for, and about half of my hair. Not the half I would have kept, but no one consulted me.
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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 teach us.
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The fact that we often judge the pleasure of an experience by its ending can cause us to make some curious choices.
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If you are like most people, then like most people, you don't know you're like most people.
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If I wanted to know what a certain future would feel like to me, I would find someone who is already living that future. If I wonder what it's like to become a lawyer or marry a busy executive or eat at a particular restaurant, my best bet is to find people who have actually done these things and see how happy they are.
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Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they're finished.
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People are drastically overconfident about their judgments of others.
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The eye and brain are conspirators, and, like most conspiracies, theirs is negotiated behind closed doors, in the back room, outside of our awareness.
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Variety improves the things that we do too often, but it rules the things that we don't do often enough.
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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.
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To learn from experience, we must remember it, and, for a variety of reasons, memory is a faithless friend.
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Your emotions are meant to fluctuate, just like your blood pressure is meant to fluctuate. It's a system that's supposed to move back and forth, between happy and unhappy. That's how the system guides you through the world.
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