"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."
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Quote collection
Daniel Gilbert quotes (page 3 of 4)
61 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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."
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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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"Humans react to danger when it is immediate, immoral, visible... Global warming does not press any of those buttons."
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"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."
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"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."
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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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"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 only it weren't blind, and then your brain fills in the scene with this information. That's right, it invents things, creates things, makes stuff up! It doesn't consult you about this, doesn't seek your approval. It just makes its best guess about the nature of the missing information and proceeds to fill in the scene."
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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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"When we have an experience -- hearing a particular sonata, making love with a particular person, watching the sun set from a particular window of a particular room -- on successive occasions, we quickly begin to adapt to it, and the experience yields less pleasure each time. Psychologists call this habituation, economists call it declining marginal utility, and the rest of us call it marriage"
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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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"Is happiness really the only thing we should be aiming for?"
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"Global warming is a deadly threat precisely because it fails to trip the brain's alarm, leaving us soundly asleep in a burning bed."
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"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!"
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"No one likes to be criticized, of course, but if the things we successfully strive for do not make our future selves happy, or if the things we unsuccessfully avoid do, then it seems reasonable (if somewhat ungracious) for them to cast a disparaging glance backward and wonder what the hell we were thinking."
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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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"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."
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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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"Arthritic toothless people who love orgasms are more likely to reproduce than are limber, toothy people who do not."
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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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