183 Quotes by Dan Ariely

Thoreau wrote, “Simplify! Simplify!” And, indeed, simplification is one mark of real genius.

Descartes said, Cogito ergo sum-“I think therefore I am.” But suppose we are nothing more than the sum of our first, naive, random behaviors. What then?

Money is a wonderful invention. It lets us save, it lets us specialize, right? I couldn’t be a professor if there wasn’t any money. Every day I would have to raise chicken and bread and broccoli and go ahead and spend all my time trading. So, money is a wonderful mechanism.

If you’re a company, my advice is to remember that you can’t have it both ways. You can’t treat your customers like family one moment and then treat them impersonally – or, even worse, as a nuisance or a competitor – a moment later when this becomes more convenient or profitable.

We are more than height, weight, religion, and income. Others judge us on the basis of general subjective and aesthetic attributes, such as our manner of speaking and our sense of humor. We are also a scent, a sparkle of the eye, a sweep of the hand, the sound of a laugh, and the knit of a brow – ineffable qualities that can’t easily be captured in a database.

The experiments show quite clearly that, as you resist more and more temptation, you’re actually more and more likely to fail.

We don’t really want a huge house, but we want the house to be slightly bigger than our neighbors, and a car that is bigger than our neighbor’s, and they’re going on vacation that’s slightly more expensive, and this escalation happens that things got out of hand.

What kind of people would be able to rationalize better than other people? Better storytellers, right? Creative people, right? Because if you’re creative, you find more ways to cheat and still yourself a story about why this is okay.

You can think about life as a battle between you and a doughnut shop. The doughnut shop wants you to eat another doughnut and pay the money, and you want to do it in the short term, but in the long term it’s not good for you either financially or from a health perspective.