On Desire Quotes

“Suppose you woke up one morning to discover that you were the last person on earth. [...] In the situation described, you could satisfy many material desires that you can't satisfy in our actual world. You could have the car of your dreams. You could even have a showroom full of expensive cars. You could have the house of your dreams - or live in a palace. You could wear very expensive clothes. You could acquire not just a big diamond ring but the Hope Diamond itself. The interesting question is this: without people around, would you still want these things?”
― William B. Irvine, On Desire: Why We Want What We Want

“According to psychologists Daniel Gilbert and Timothy Wilson, we have an unfortunate tendency to “miswant”—to want things that we won’t like once we get them. “In a perfect world,” they observe, “wanting would cause trying, trying would cause getting, [and] getting would cause liking.”20 But ours is not a perfect world. In particular, our predictions about what we will like tend to be mistaken, and as a result, we tend to want things that, when we get them, will make little difference to our level of happiness. (The”
― William B. Irvine, On Desire: Why We Want What We Want

“Psychologist Robert Zajonc takes this claim one step further: “For most decisions, it is extremely difficult to demonstrate that there has actually been any prior cognitive process whatsoever.”28 It isn’t that the decisions people make are irrational; it’s that the process by which decisions are made are utterly unlike the step-by-step rational process that might be used to solve, say, a math problem. Decisions are typically made in the unconscious mind, by means of some unknown process. Indeed,”
― William B. Irvine, On Desire: Why We Want What We Want

“Psychologist Arthur S. Reber offers the following summary of the psychological research on decision making: “During the 1970s . . . it became increasingly apparent that people do not typically solve problems, make decisions, or reach conclusions using the kinds of standard, conscious, and rational processes that they were more-or-less assumed to be using.” To the contrary, people could best be described, in much of their decision making, as being “arational”: “When people were observed making choices and solving problems of interesting complexity, the rational and logical elements were often missing.”
― William B. Irvine, On Desire: Why We Want What We Want

“reason tends to be the servant rather than the master of desire.”
― William B. Irvine, On Desire: Why We Want What We Want

“the people whose views we will examine in the following pages—have unanimously drawn the conclusion that the best way—indeed, perhaps the only way—to attain lasting happiness is not to change the world around us or our place in it but to change ourselves.”
― William B. Irvine, On Desire: Why We Want What We Want

“In a full-fledged case of desire, by way of contrast, a creature is able to form a mental representation of the thing it desires, compare the current state [sic] with the desired state, and initiate action to diminish these states. Only a creature with considerable brainpower will have these abilities.”
― William B. Irvine, On Desire: Why We Want What We Want

“Why do we care about what other people earn or own? Because we tend to regard life as an ongoing competition for social status. When”
― William B. Irvine, On Desire: Why We Want What We Want

“Arthur Schopenhauer argued that the intellect doesn’t rule the will. According to him, “the intellect gets to know the conclusions of the will only a posteriori and empirically.”53 Indeed, the operation of the will is a “secret workshop” into which the intellect cannot penetrate.54 The intellect, he concludes, is a “mere tool in the service of the will.”
― William B. Irvine, On Desire: Why We Want What We Want

“Another Damasio patient, “Elliot,” was a successful husband, father, and businessman until undergoing brain surgery on a tumor. The surgery damaged his frontal lobe and thereby affected his ability to carry through on plans. He would embark on a project only to lose sight of his goal in doing so. For example, asked to sort documents, he would go overboard: “He was likely, all of a sudden, to turn from the sorting task he had initiated to reading one of those papers carefully and intelligently, and to spend an entire day doing so. Or he might spend a whole afternoon deliberating on which principle of categorization should be applied.”
― William B. Irvine, On Desire: Why We Want What We Want

“To better understand the predicament of someone who is rational but emotionless, consider computers. Give a computer a program to run, and it will use flawless logic to execute it. But unless you give a computer a program to run, it will just sit there. Computers need a motivating force before they will do anything, and it is the job of the programmer to provide this motivating force. Damasio’s patient was like an unprogrammed computer. His”
― William B. Irvine, On Desire: Why We Want What We Want

“Why do we embrace the ideal of conscious agency? Why, in other words, do we want our choices to have been conscious choices? In part because of social pressures. As Wegner points out, if you can’t answer the question “What are you doing?” those around you are likely to think you are asleep, drugged, or crazy. In order to avoid having others think such things of us, we make up reasons for what we do. Indeed, we may even claim to have wanted to do things we couldn’t possibly have wanted to do.”
― William B. Irvine, On Desire: Why We Want What We Want

“Psychologist Daniel M. Wegner has gone so far as to argue that conscious will is an illusion—that despite appearances, what causes my finger to rise is not my consciously willing that it rise but something else.”
― William B. Irvine, On Desire: Why We Want What We Want

“In the words of Libet, “The initiation of the freely voluntary act appears to begin in the brain unconsciously, well before the person consciously knows he wants to act!”
― William B. Irvine, On Desire: Why We Want What We Want

“Success is very much like a drug: it makes you feel good; you don’t know what you are missing until you experience it; once you experience it, you want more; and in your attempts to recapture that first high, you will have to resort to ever bigger “doses.” And if success is like a drug, some drugs are like success: a cocaine high, I am told, very much resembles the rush of success.”
― William B. Irvine, On Desire: Why We Want What We Want

“The intellect, as we have seen, cannot command the emotions, but it can channel currently existing emotional energy. If, for example, the emotions want X, the intellect might talk them into wanting to do Y by pointing out that doing it will get them X. As soon as the emotions are convinced that doing Y will get them X, the anxiety they felt with respect to X will transfer to Y. The intellect can then point out to the emotions that by doing Z, they can get Y; again, the anxiety will transfer. In this manner, anxiety flows down the chains of desire formed by the intellect. We thereby become motivated to fulfill the instrumental desires in these chains, even though doing so won’t itself feel good—indeed, even though doing so will feel bad.”
― William B. Irvine, On Desire: Why We Want What We Want

“When our emotions form a terminal desire, we feel motivated to fulfill it: to do so will feel good, or at any rate, will feel better than not fulfilling it. But what about the instrumental desires our intellect forms so we can fulfill this terminal desire? Fulfillment of these instrumental desires won’t itself feel good; indeed, for the pre-law student to drag himself out of bed will feel distinctly bad. More generally, although the objects of terminal desires formed by the emotions are inherently desirable, the objects of instrumental desires formed by the intellect aren’t. What is it, then, that motivates us to fulfill these instrumental desires?”
― William B. Irvine, On Desire: Why We Want What We Want

“The supporting role played by the intellect becomes apparent when a person is mentally depressed. Those who slip into depression are just as intelligent as they used to be. (If their score drops on an IQ test, it is because they don’t feel motivated to take the test, not because they became less rational.) But because of their depressed state, the flow of terminal desires formed by their emotions slows to a trickle. They no longer feel like eating, having sex, listening to music, or going to parties. In such cases, the intellect doesn’t generate terminal desires to take up the slack. Rather, it sits there idle.”
― William B. Irvine, On Desire: Why We Want What We Want

“If the lackey replies that the voluptuary has already had a lot to drink, the voluptuary will be unfazed: he will simply gaze at the lackey with clouded eyes and repeat the demand. If the lackey ignores him, the voluptuary might start chanting, “Whiskey! Whiskey!” until the lackey can’t take it anymore. A better strategy for the lackey, if he wants the voluptuary to forgo whiskey, is to point out that if he drinks any more, he won’t be able to enjoy the women who will later be arriving for his amusement. This reminder might make the voluptuary drop his demand for whiskey.”
― William B. Irvine, On Desire: Why We Want What We Want

“Something like this happens with the intellect. It can’t avoid the whining of the emotions and can’t hope to modify their behavior. The intellect quickly figures out that the only sensible way—indeed, the rational way—to deal with the emotions is to unhesitatingly give them what they want most of the time and thereby conserve its strength so it can fight and win the battles that really matter—namely, to overcome the most undesirable of those desires generated by the emotions.”
― William B. Irvine, On Desire: Why We Want What We Want

“Now imagine an ultra-headstrong five-year-old, who never tires of whining, whose whining can’t be avoided, and whose behavior can’t be modified. The parents of such a child would quickly realize the futility of resisting the child’s entreaties. They would realize that in the long run, their life will be tolerable only if they give the child what he wants most of the time and save their energy for a few well-chosen battles. These parents will quickly get into the habit of saying yes to their child. Indeed, so quickly will they say yes that we—and maybe they as well—might forget that they have the power to say no.”
― William B. Irvine, On Desire: Why We Want What We Want

“The intellect can also use emotions not to fight emotions but to arouse them. Artificial intelligence researcher Marvin Minsky, for example, describes a situation in which he is having trouble concentrating on his research. In order to stay focused, he imagines that a competing researcher is on the verge of solving the problem Minsky is trying to solve. The trick works: Minsky stays focused even though he knows, intellectually, that the other researcher is unlikely to solve the problem, inasmuch as he has never shown the least interest in it.2 Thus, although the intellect cannot command the emotions to commit to one of its projects, it might be able to trick them into committing.”
― William B. Irvine, On Desire: Why We Want What We Want

“The emotions are perfectly willing to listen to the intellect as long as the intellect isn’t trying to impose its views but is merely trying to help the emotions get what they want.”
― William B. Irvine, On Desire: Why We Want What We Want

“In the words of Epicurus, “Nothing satisfies the man who is not satisfied with a little.”2”
― William B. Irvine, On Desire: Why We Want What We Want

“In the words of Epicurus, “Nothing satisfies the man who is not satisfied with a little.”
― William B. Irvine, On Desire: Why We Want What We Want