183 Quotes by Dan Ariely

Your immediate environment is comprised of coffee shops, supermarkets, websites, apps and all kinds of things – none of which have an interest in your long-term or short-term financial well-being.

This is the problem of relativity-we look at our decisions in a relative way and compare them locally to the available alternative.

Tom had discovered a great law of human action, namely, that in order to make a man covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.

We may not always know exactly why we do what we do, choose what we choose, or feel what we feel. But the obscurity of our real motivations doesn’t stop us from creating perfectly logical-sounding reasons for our actions, decisions, and feelings.

When people are in severe pain, there’s an expression, you’re a “pain person,” and what that means is that nothing else matters.

Not all debt is bad. From time to time we should get into debt when there’s a good reason for that.

Why would you take money out of your paycheck at the beginning of the month when you don’t know how much money you’ll need?

The effort that we put into something does not just change the object. It changes us and the way we evaluate that object. Greater labor leads to greater love. Our overvaluation of the things we make runs so deep that we assume that others share our biased perspective. When we cannot complete something into which we have put great effort, we don’t feel so attached to it.

Disasters are usually a good time to re-examine what we’ve done so far, what mistakes we’ve made, and what improvements should come next.