Our inability to recall how we really felt is why our wealth of experiences turns out to be poverty of riches.

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.

Perceptions are portraits, not photographs, and their form reveals the artist’s hand every bit as much as it reflects the things portrayed

The good news is that going blind is not going to make you as unhappy as you think it will. The bad news is that winning the lottery will not make you as happy as you expect.

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

My friends tell me that I have a tendency to point out problems without offering solutions, but they never tell me what I should do about it.

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.