Top 60 Barry Schwartz Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Students work to get good grades even when they have no interest in their studies.”

— Barry Schwartz

2. “If you seek and accept only the best, you are a maximizer.”

— Barry Schwartz

3. “The more difficult information gathering is, the more likely it is that you will rely on the decisions of others.”

— Barry Schwartz

4. “But by restricting our options, we will be able to choose less and feel better.”

— Barry Schwartz

5. “Learning to accept “good enough” will simplify decision making and increase satisfaction.”

— Barry Schwartz

6. “According to a survey conducted by Yankelovich Partners, a majority of people want more control over the details of their lives, but a majority of people also want to simplify their lives. There you have it – the paradox of our times.”

— Barry Schwartz

7. “The existence of multiple alternatives makes it easy for us to imagine alternatives that don’t exist – alternatives that combine the attractive features of the ones that do exist. And to the extent that we engage our imaginations in this way, we will be even less satisfied with the alternative we end up choosing. So, once again, a greater variety of choices actually makes us feel worse.”

— Barry Schwartz

8. “Practical wisdom,” Aristotle told us, “is the combination of moral will and moral skill.”

— Barry Schwartz

9. “One way of achieving this goal is by keeping wonderful experiences rare. No matter what you can afford, save great wine for special occasions.”

— Barry Schwartz

10. “Over two centuries ago Adam Smith observed that individual freedom of choice ensures the most efficient production and distribution of society’s goods. A competitive market, unhindered by the government and filled with entrepreneurs eager to pinpoint consumers’ needs and desires, will be exquisitely responsive to them.”

— Barry Schwartz

11. “But knowing what we want means, in essence, being able to anticipate accurately how one choice or another will make us feel, and that is no simple task.”

— Barry Schwartz

12. “Apparently we always think we want choice, but when we actually get it, we may not like it. Meanwhile, the need to chose in ever more aspects of life causes us more distress than we realize.”

— Barry Schwartz

13. “As advertising professor James Twitchell puts it, “Ads are what we know about the world around us.”

— Barry Schwartz

14. “I think that in modern America, we have far too many options for breakfast cereal and not enough options for president.”

— Barry Schwartz

15. “We are free to be the authors of our own lives, but we don’t know what kind of lives we want to ’write.”

— Barry Schwartz

16. “So to make the task of lowering expectations easier: Reduce the number of options you consider. Be a satisficer rather than a maximizer. Allow for serendipity.”

— Barry Schwartz

17. “Most of us think about empathy as a “feeling” or an “emotion.” It is. To be empathetic is to be able to feel what the other person is feeling. But empathy is more than just a feeling. In order to be able to feel what another person is feeling, you need to be able to see the world as that other person sees it. This ability to take the perspective of another demands perception and imagination. Empathy thus reflects the integration of thinking and feeling.”

— Barry Schwartz

18. “The discrepancy between logic and memory suggests that we don’t always know what we want.”

— Barry Schwartz

19. “Lane writes that we are paying for increased affluence and increased freedom with a substantial decrease in the quality and quantity of social relations.”

— Barry Schwartz

20. “Even though we don’t expect it to happen, such adaptation to pleasure is inevitable, and it may cause more disappointment in a world of many choices than in a world of few.”

— Barry Schwartz

21. “We could go a long way toward improving the experienced well-being of people in our society if we could find a way to stop the process of adaptation.”

— Barry Schwartz

22. “Some studies have estimated that losses have more than twice the psychological impact as equivalent gains. The fact is, we all hate to lose, which Kahneman and Tversky refer to as loss aversion.”

— Barry Schwartz

23. “And once people are in the position to be able to work at any time from any place, they face decisions every minute of every day about whether or not to be working.”

— Barry Schwartz

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

— Barry Schwartz

25. “We are surrounded by modern, time-saving devices, but we never seem to have enough time.”

— Barry Schwartz

26. “Freedom to choose has what might be called expressive value. Choice is what enables us to tell the world who we are and what we care about.”

— Barry Schwartz

27. “But if unrestricted freedom can impede the individual’s pursuit of what he or she values most, then it may be that some restrictions make everyone better off. And if “constraint” sometimes affords a kind of liberation while “freedom” affords a kind of enslavement, then people would be wise to seek out some measure of appropriate constraint.”

— Barry Schwartz

28. “In a world of scarcity, opportunities don’t present themselves in bunches, and the decisions people face are between approach and avoidance, acceptance or rejection.”

— Barry Schwartz

29. “What we don’t realize is that the very option of being allowed to change our minds seems to increase the chances that we will change our minds.”

— Barry Schwartz

30. “Now students are required to make choices about education that may affect them for the rest of their lives. And they are forced to make these choices at a point in their intellectual development when they may lack the resources to make them intelligently.”

— Barry Schwartz

31. “Ninety percent of adults spend half their waking lives doing things they would rather not be doing at places they would rather not be.”

— Barry Schwartz

32. “The choice of when to be a chooser may be the most important choice we have to make.”

— Barry Schwartz

33. “Most good decisions will involve these steps: Figure out your goal or goals. Evaluate the importance of each goal. Array the options. Evaluate how likely each of the options is to meet your goals. Pick the winning option. Later use the consequences of your choice to modify your goals, the importance you assign them, and the way you evaluate future possibilities.”

— Barry Schwartz

34. “When asked about what they regret most in the last six months, people tend to identify actions that didn’t meet expectations. But when asked about what they regret most when they look back on their lives as a whole, people tend to identify failures to act.”

— Barry Schwartz

35. “Being able to criticize our own certainties is often a painful struggle, demanding some courage as we try to stand back and impartially judge ourselves and our own responsibility.”

— Barry Schwartz

36. “In general, human beings are remarkably bad at predicting how various experiences will make them feel.”

— Barry Schwartz

37. “Emotions properly trained and modulated, Aristotle told his readers, are essential to being practically wise: We can experience fear, confidence, desire, anger, pity, and generally any kind of pleasure and pain either too much or too little, and in either case not properly. But to experience all this at the right time, toward the right objects, toward the right people, for the right reason, and in the right manner – that is the median and the best course, the course that is a mark of virtue.”

— Barry Schwartz

38. “We would be better off if we lowered our expectations about the results of decisions.”

— Barry Schwartz

39. “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.”

— Barry Schwartz

40. “Buying jeans is a trivial matter, but it suggests a much larger theme we will pursue throughout this book, which is this: When people have no choice, life is almost unbearable.”

— Barry Schwartz

41. “Social scientist Alex Michalos, in his discussion of the perceived quality of experience, argued that people establish standards of satisfaction based on the assessment of three gaps: “the gap between what one has and wants, the gap between what one has and thinks others like oneself have, and the gap between what one has and the best one has had in the past.”

— Barry Schwartz

42. “On the contrary, it’s a way to make sure that you can continue to experience pleasure. What’s the point of great meals, great wines, and great blouses if they don’t make you feel great?”

— Barry Schwartz

43. “Knowing what’s good enough requires knowing yourself and what you care about. So: Think about occasions in life when you settle, comfortably, for “good enough”; Scrutinize how you choose in those areas; Then apply that strategy more broadly.”

— Barry Schwartz

44. “The key thing to appreciate, though, is that what is most important to us, most of the time, is not the objective results of decisions, but the subjective results.”

— Barry Schwartz

45. “Thus, from cradle to grave, having control over one’s life matters.”

— Barry Schwartz

46. “Notice that the curve falls steeply at the beginning and then gradually levels off. This reflects what might be called the “decreasing marginal disutility of losses.”

— Barry Schwartz

47. “Pay attention to what you’re giving up in the next-best alternative, but don’t waste energy feeling bad about having passed up an option further down the list that you wouldn’t have gotten to anyway.”

— Barry Schwartz

48. “But clearly, the lesson is that incentives can be a dangerous weapon. A critic of this research might say that the problem is not incentives, but dumb incentives. No doubt, some incentives are dumber than others. But no incentives can ever be smart enough to substitute for people who do the right thing because it’s the right thing.”

— Barry Schwartz

49. “So the researchers concluded that being forced to confront trade-offs in making decisions makes people unhappy and indecisive.”

— Barry Schwartz

50. “If society asks more of us, and arranges its social institutions appropriately, it will get more.”

— Barry Schwartz