Top 120 Dan Ariely Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Even the most analytical thinkers are predictably irrational; the really smart ones acknowledge and address their irrationalities.”

— Dan Ariely

2. “Giving up on our long-term goals for immediate gratification, my friends, is procrastination.”

— Dan Ariely

Featured in: Procrastination Quotes

3. “When we think about labor, we usually think about motivation and payment as the same thing, but the reality is that we should probably add all kinds of things to it – meaning, creation, challenges, ownership, identity, pride.”

— Dan Ariely

4. “People are irrational – and predictably so.”

— Dan Ariely

5. “Money is all about opportunity cost. Every time you spend on something, that’s something you can’t spend on something else.”

— Dan Ariely

6. “One of the big lessons from behavioral economics is that we make decisions as a function of the environment that we’re in.”

— Dan Ariely

7. “With everything you do, in fact, you should train yourself to question your repeated behaviors.”

— Dan Ariely

8. “We are all far less rational in our decision-making than standard economic theory assumes. Our irrational behaviors are neither random nor senseless: they are systematic and predictable. We all make the same types of mistakes over and over, because of the basic wiring of our brains.”

— Dan Ariely

9. “When you’re in pain, tomorrow doesn’t exist – just the pain – and the only thing that you want in the world is for it to go away.”

— Dan Ariely

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

— Dan Ariely

11. “Brands communicate in two directions: they help us tell other people something about ourselves, but they also help us form ideas about who we are.”

— Dan Ariely

12. “Once you break the social norm and create a new social norm, all of a sudden it can stay with us for a long time.”

— Dan Ariely

13. “Rainy day savings are incredibly important, because from time to time, bad things happen. And if you’re not prepared for that, it’s going to be really terrible.”

— Dan Ariely

14. “Because cheating is easier when we can justify our behavior, people often cheat in small amounts: We can come up with an excuse for stealing Post-It notes, but it is much more difficult to come up with an excuse for taking $10,000 from petty cash.”

— Dan Ariely

15. “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.”

— Dan Ariely

16. “We all think that in the future, we are wonderful people. We will be patient, we will not procrastinate, we will exercise, we will eat well... The problem is we never get to live in that future. We always live in the present.”

— Dan Ariely

17. “The more cashless our society becomes, the more our moral compass slips.”

— Dan Ariely

18. “But because human being tend to focus on short-term benefits and our own immediate needs, such tragedies of the commons occur frequently .”

— Dan Ariely

19. “The major thing that holds you back when you’re trying to change a bad habit like eating, smoking, or drinking too much is your belief you are out of control.”

— Dan Ariely

20. “Honesty is a complex and tricky thing, and we don’t want to be honest all the time.”

— Dan Ariely

21. “The idea that you will make the right decision every time is very unlikely.”

— Dan Ariely

22. “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.”

— Dan Ariely

23. “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.”

— Dan Ariely

24. “We should teach the students, as well as executives, how to conduct experiments, how to examine data, and how to use these tools to make better decisions.”

— Dan Ariely

25. “There are many examples to show that people will work more for a cause than for cash.”

— Dan Ariely

26. “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.”

— Dan Ariely

27. “The most difficult thing is to recognize that sometimes we too are blinded by our own incentives. Because we don’t see how our conflicts of interest work on us.”

— Dan Ariely

28. “Locks won’t protect you from the thieves, who can get in your house if they really want to. They will only protect you from the mostly honest people who might be tempted to try your door if it had no lock.”

— Dan Ariely

29. “It is true that from a behavioral economics perspective we are fallible, easily confused, not that smart, and often irrational. We are more like Homer Simpson than Superman. So from this perspective it is rather depressing. But at the same time there is also a silver lining. There are free lunches!”

— Dan Ariely

30. “People are willing to work free, and they are willing to work for a reasonable wage; but offer them just a small payment and they will walk away.”

— Dan Ariely

31. “When parents have college savings accounts for their kids, their kids show higher social and cognitive performance.”

— Dan Ariely

32. “The danger of expecting nothing is that, in the end, it might be all we’ll get.”

— Dan Ariely

33. “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?”

— Dan Ariely

34. “MONEY, AS IT turns out, is very often the most expensive way to motivate people. Social norms are not only cheaper, but often more effective as well.”

— Dan Ariely

35. “The problem with opportunity cost is that opportunity cost is divided among many, many things.”

— Dan Ariely

36. “Dishonesty is all about the small acts we can take and then think, ‘No, this not real cheating.’ So if you think that the main mechanism is rationalization, then what you come up with, and that’s what we find, is that we’re basically trying to balance feeling good about ourselves.”

— Dan Ariely

37. “The retail industry has its own headache: it loses $16 billion a year to customers who buy clothes, wear them with the tags tucked in, and return these secondhand clothes for a full refund.”

— Dan Ariely

38. “The first dishonest act is the most important one to prevent.”

— Dan Ariely

39. “Thinking is difficult and sometimes unpleasant.”

— Dan Ariely

40. “Most transactions have an upside and a downside, but when something is FREE! we forget the downside. FREE! gives us such an emotional charge that we perceive what is being offered as immensely more valuable than it really is. Why? I think it’s because humans are intrinsically afraid of loss.”

— Dan Ariely

41. “Believing you are a bad person leads to a slippery slope.”

— Dan Ariely

42. “Resisting temptation and instilling self-control are general human goals, and repeatedly failing to achieve them is a source of much of our misery.”

— Dan Ariely

43. “Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose. – Viktor E. Frankl.”

— Dan Ariely

44. “There’s an old saying, “One man’s ceiling is another man’s floor.” Well, when you’re the owner, you’re at the ceiling; and when you’re the buyer, you’re at the floor.”

— Dan Ariely

45. “While we somehow understand revenge on an intuitive level between individuals, I do suspect that companies, assuming that people are rational, completely miss and underestimate the motivation people have for revenge.”

— Dan Ariely

46. “It is very difficult to make really big, important, life-changing decisions because we are all susceptible to a formidable array of decision biases. There are more of them than we realize, and they come to visit us more often than we like to admit.”

— Dan Ariely

47. “If I gave you now, $10 as a gift, how happy would you be? Would you be happy, is the marginal $10, the best use of $10 you can use? Of course not. If I have you a CD, you know exactly what you are getting and you will have a value for it. So, money has lots of problems with it.”

— Dan Ariely

48. “I don’t think we should go around life and being miserable all the time and feel the pain of paying. It’s a question of what categories we want to spend more on and what categories we want feel that we are spending too much on and we want to cut down.”

— Dan Ariely

49. “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.”

— Dan Ariely

50. “That’s a lesson we can all learn: the more we have, the more we want. And the only cure is to break the cycle of relativity.”

— Dan Ariely