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.

The fact that we often judge the pleasure of an experience by its ending can cause us to make some curious choices.

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.

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.

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.

Everyone who has observed human behavior for more than thirty continuous seconds seems to have noticed that people are strongly, perhaps even primarily, perhaps even single-mindedly, motivated to feel happy.

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