Author of the international bestseller “Stumble over happiness”, which has been translated into more than 30 languages and won the Aventis Prize in 2007. He has also written essays for various newspapers and magazines, has made a short television series and has made talks for TED.
Quotes and ideas
- One of the cruellest truths in life is that wonderful things are especially wonderful the first time they occur, but their wonderfulness fades with repetition.
- The brain and the eye have a contractual relationship in which the brain is committed to believing what the eye sees, but in return the eye is committed to seeking what the brain wants.
- People are happier when they try to achieve difficult goals but not out of reach.
- Our desire to control is so powerful and the feeling of being in control so rewarding that people often act as if they can control the uncontrollable.
- As soon as I learned that mistakes are interesting, I began to plan a life with several of them.
- The good news is that going blind won't make you as unhappy as you think it will be. The bad news is that winning the lottery won't make you as happy as you expect.
- Most people do quite well when things go very wrong.
- The truth is, bad things don't affect us as deeply as we hope they will. That's true of the good things, too. We adapt very quickly to either one.
- The future is fundamentally different from what it seems through our own gaze.
- The eye and the brain are conspirators and, like most conspiracies, it deals behind closed doors, in the back room, out of our consciousness.
- The key to happiness, fulfillment and enlightenment is to stop thinking so much about the future.
- Not thinking about the future is much more difficult than being a professor of psychology.
- Our emotions are bound to fluctuate, as is our blood pressure. It is a system that is supposed to move back and forth, between happy and unhappy. This is how the system guides us through the world.
- In fact, thinking about the future can be so pleasant that sometimes we prefer to think about it instead of doing what we can to get there.
- Events that challenge our optimistic beliefs can sometimes make us more and not less optimistic.
- Anticipating unpleasant events can minimize their impact.
- Emotion is a compass that tells us what to do. A compass that is perpetually stuck at a single point is useless.
- What is the link between anxiety and planning? Both of course are intimately connected when we think about the future.
- The secret to happiness is variety, but the secret to variety, like the secret to all spices, is knowing when to use it.
- We are surprised when we expect something other than what we have, even when we did not know that we were not expecting anything.
- We treat our future selves as if they were our children, spending most of the hours of most of our days building mornings that we hope will make them happy.
- People are overconfident in their judgments about others.
- My friends tell me that I have a tendency to point out problems without offering solutions, but they have never told me what to do about it.
- The greatest achievement of the human brain is its ability to imagine objects and episodes that do not exist in the realm of reality, and it is this ability that allows us to think about the future.
- Surprise is an emotion that we feel when we meet the unexpected.
- Young children cannot say what they want to be in the future because they do not really understand what the future means.
- Fear, worry and anxiety have a very useful function to manage our lives.
- Better to be a dissatisfied human being than a satisfied pig; Better to be a dissatisfied Socrates than a satisfied fool. And if the fool, or the pig, have a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the facts.
- At some point between our chairs and our rocking chairs, we learn about the future.
- If you are like most people, like most people, you don't know that you are like most people.
- Unfortunately, even great ideas don't leave fossils for carbon dating.
- Our brain accepts what the eyes see and our eyes seek what our brain wants.
- Happiness refers to feelings, virtue refers to actions, and those actions can cause those feelings. But not necessarily and not exclusively.
- The frontal lobe is the recent creation of the human brain that allows us to imagine the future.
- The fact that we often judge the pleasure of an experience by its ending can cause us to do some really curious things.
- We are unable to remember how we really feel in a situation, which is why our wealth of experiences turns out to be the poverty of wealth.
- Within a couple of weeks, even earthquake survivors return to their normal level of optimism.
- Research suggests that people are generally unaware of the reasons why they are doing what they are doing, but when asked for a reason, they readily offer it.
- Most of us seem to believe that we are more athletic, smart, organized, ethical, logical, interesting, open-minded, and healthy, not to mention more attractive than the average person can be.
- Each of us is trapped in a place, a time, and a circumstance, and our attempts to use our minds to transcend those limits are often ineffective.
- Reduce your cortisol level. The happiest people have the lowest level of cortisol, a stress hormone that increases blood pressure and weakens the immune system. Reduce stress (do more yoga, lower your level of aggressiveness) and you will reduce the production of cortisol.
- We prefer to listen to the words of other people who have already been preselected by us about what we want to hear.
- What is more important: experience or memory of experience? If you could have an hour of ecstasy that you would always remember as torture, or an hour of torture that you would always remember as ecstasy, which one do you prefer?
- We do not believe that other people's experiences can tell us much. I think this is an illusion of uniqueness.
- Few of us can accurately measure how we will feel tomorrow or next week. That is why when you go to the supermarket on an empty stomach, you will buy too much, and if you buy after a big meal, you will buy too little.
- 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 really just ways to get more friends and family.
- People want to be happy, and all the other things we want are only a means to that end.
- Human beings can think deeply about the future and foresee disasters, but we still do nothing in the present to stop them. Most people on this planet are overwhelmed with concerns about their immediate well-being.
- Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think that they are finished.
- The data says that the poor, with a little money, can buy a lot of happiness. If you are rich, a lot of money can buy a little more happiness. But in both cases, money does.
- What would you do right now if you knew you were going to die in ten minutes?