From Stumbling on Happiness

"The eye and brain are conspirators, and like most conspiracies; theirs is negotiated behind closed doors, in the back room, outside of our awareness"

"Distorted views of reality are made possible by the fact that experiences are ambiguous­, that is, they can be credibly viewed in many ways, some of which are more positive than others. To ensure that our views are credible, our brain accepts what our eye sees. To ensure that our views are positive, our eye looks for what our brain wants. The conspiracy between these two servants allows us to live at the fulcrum of stark reality and comforting illusion. So what does all of this have to do with forecasting our emotional futures? As we are about to see, we may live at the fulcrum of reality and illusion, but most of us don't know our own address"

"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"

"Not to think about the future requires that we convince our frontal lobe to do what it was designed to do, and like a heart that is told not to beat, it naturally resists that suggestion"

"The price we pay for our irresponsible explanatory urge is that we often spoil our most pleasant experiences by making good sense of them"

"To learn from experience, we must remember it, and for a variety of reasons, memory is a faithless friend"

-Daniel Gilbert