81 Quotes by Barry Schwartz

The secret to happiness is low expectations.

If we design workplaces that permit people to find meaning in their work, we will be designing a human nature that values work,

Practical wisdom," Aristotle told us, "is the combination of moral will and moral skill.

The lesson here is that high expectations can be counter-productive. We probably can do more to affect the quality of our lives by controlling our expectations than we can by doing virtually anything else. The blessing of modest expectations is that they leave room for many experiences to be a pleasant surprise, a hedonic plus. The challenge is to find a way to keep expectations modest, even as actual experiences keep getting better.

The mistake is to assume that the way it feels at the moment is the way it will feel forever.

Much of human progress has involved reducing the time and energy, as well as the number of processes we have to engage in and think about, for each of us to obtain the necessities of life.

If you shatter the fish bowl so that everything is possible you don't have freedom you have paralysis. Everybody needs a fishbowl.

When you rely on incentives, you undermine virtues. Then when you discover that you actually need people who want to do the right thing, those people don't exist because you've crushed anyone's desire to do the right thing with all these incentives.

Everybody makes money for a living, but most of us actually do something that has a point, in addition to just making money. We examine and treat patients, we teach students, we draw up contracts and wills, we write for newspapers, magazines, and web sites, we clean floors, or we serve meals.