The human brain is the only object in the known universe that can predict its own future and tell its on fortune. The fact that we can make disastrous decisions even as we foresee their consequences is the great, unsolved mystery of human behavior. When you hold your fate in your hands, why would you ever make a fist?

People want to be happy, and all the other things they want are typically meant to be a means to that end.

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 humans can look deep into future and predict what will happen, but then turn around and do nothing 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.

Psychologists call this habituation, economists call it declining marginal utility, and the rest of us call it marriage.

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.