Dan Gilbert > Quotes

“memory is a faithless friend”
― Dan Gilbert

“Global warming is by its very nature a threat, but it is a deadly threat only because it fails to trigger the brain's alarm. It leaves us sleeping in a burning bed.”
― Dan Gilbert

“At every stage of our lives we make decisions that will profoundly influence the lives of the people we're going to become, and then when we become those people, we're not always thrilled with the decisions we made. So young people pay good money to get tattoos removed that teenagers paid good money to get. Middle-aged people rushed to divorce people who young adults rushed to marry. Older adults work hard to lose what middle-aged adults worked hard to gain. On and on and on. The question is, as a psychologist, that fascinates me is, why do we make decisions that our future selves so often regret?”
― Dan Gilbert

“The bottom line is, time is a powerful force. It transforms our preferences. It reshapes our values. It alters our personalities. We seem to appreciate this fact, but only in retrospect. Only when we look backwards do we realize how much change happens in a decade. It's as if, for most of us, the present is a magic time. It's a watershed on the timeline. It's the moment at which we finally become ourselves. Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they're finished. The person you are right now is as transient, as fleeting and as temporary as all the people you've ever been. The one constant in our life is change.”
― Dan Gilbert

“We overpay for the opportunity to indulge our current preferences because we overestimate their stability.”
― Dan Gilbert

“There are more ways to think about experience than there are experience to think about.”
― Dan Gilbert

“I think that someone should do a version of Die Hard in heroic couplets.”
― Dan Gilbert, The Poet's Cookbook: Details for over 50 forms, types of meter, structure, rhyme and over 100 writing exercises.