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Daniel Gilbert
More books by Daniel Gilbert…
“One of the reasons why most of us think of ourselves as talented, friendly, wise, and fair-minded is that these words are the lexical equivalents of a Necker cube, and the human mind naturally exploits each word's ambiguity for its own gratification.”
― Stumbling on Happiness
― Stumbling on Happiness
“Among life's cruelest truths is this one: Wonderful things are especially wonderful the first time they happen, but their wonderfulness wanes with repetition. Just compare the first and last time your child said "Mama" or your partner said "I love you" and you'll know exactly what I mean. 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.”
― Stumbling on Happiness
― Stumbling on Happiness
“When we were children, our mothers taught us to call that looking-at-the-school bus experience yellow, and being compliant little learners, we did as we were told. We were pleased when it later turned out that everyone else in the kindergarten claimed to experience yellow when they looked at a bus too. But these shared labels may mask the fact that our actual experiences of yellow are quite different, which is why many people do not discover that they are color-blind until late in life when an ophthalmologist notices that they do not make the distinctions that others seem to make. So while it seems rather unlikely that human beings have radically different experiences when they look at a school bus, when they hear a baby cry, or when they smell a former skunk, it is possible, and if you want to believe it, then you have every right and no one who values her time should try to reason with you.”
― Stumbling on Happiness
― Stumbling on Happiness
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