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Is happiness really the only thing we should be aiming for?

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
Happiness
Thing
Really
Aiming

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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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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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To learn from experience, we must remember it, and, for a variety of reasons, memory is a faithless friend.
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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.
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Our brain accepts what the eyes see and our eye looks for whatever our brain wants.
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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.
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Which is more important - experience or memory of experience? If you could have an hour of ecstasy that you'd forever remember as torture, or an hour of torture that you'd forever remember as ecstasy, which would you prefer?
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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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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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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.
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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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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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The mistakes we make when we try to imagine our personal futures are also lawful, regular, and systematic. They, too, have a pattern that tells us about the powers and limits of foresight in much the same way that optical illusions tell us about the powers and limits of eyesight.
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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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People want to be happy, and all the other things they want are typically meant to be a means to that end.
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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.
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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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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.
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