Top 120 Dan Ariely Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “This is the problem of relativity-we look at our decisions in a relative way and compare them locally to the available alternative.”

— Dan Ariely

52. “In a modern democracy, he said, people are beset not by a lack of opportunity, but by a dizzying abundance of it.”

— Dan Ariely

53. “Imagine you owe on five credit cards, you owe five debts. So which debt should you pay first? And the answer is very simple: You should pay the one with the highest interest rate first. But that’s not what people do.”

— Dan Ariely

54. “Fundamentally, when we value effort over outcome, we’re paying for incompetence.”

— Dan Ariely

55. “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.”

— Dan Ariely

56. “The people that lend you money basically give you an answer based on the risk that they are willing to take. But just because a bank is willing to take a particular risk doesn’t mean that that is the right amount for me to spend.”

— Dan Ariely

57. “If I were to distill one main lesson from the research described in this book, it is that we are pawns in a game whose forces we largely fail to comprehend. We usually think of ourselves as sitting in the driver’s seat, with ultimate control over the decisions we make and the direction our life takes; but, alas, this perception has more to do with our desires-with how we want to view ourselves-than with reality.”

— Dan Ariely

58. “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.”

— Dan Ariely

59. “Marketing is all about providing information that will heighten someone’s anticipated and real pleasure.”

— Dan Ariely

60. “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.”

— Dan Ariely

61. “If companies really want their workers to produce, they should try to impart a sense of meaning – not just through vision statements but by allowing employees to feel a sense of completion and ensuring that a job well done is acknowledged. At the end of the day, such factors can exert a huge influence on satisfaction and productivity.”

— Dan Ariely

62. “When you get a checking account, you should have a savings account, and the number for the savings account should be one off of your checking account.”

— Dan Ariely

63. “Take a brilliant, creative social scientist, without any respect for conventional wisdom and you get Ellen Langer. She is a fantastic storyteller, and Counterclockwise is a fascinating story about the unexpected ways in which our minds and bodies are connected.”

— Dan Ariely

64. “But suppose we are nothing more than the sum of our first, naive, random behaviors. What then?”

— Dan Ariely

65. “It is helpful to think of people as having two fundamental motivations: the desire to see ourselves as honest, good people, and the desire to gain the benefits that come from cheating – on our taxes or on the football field.”

— Dan Ariely

66. “In the scientific world, the Not-Invented-Here bias is fondly called the “toothbrush theory.” The idea is that everyone wants a toothbrush, everyone needs one, everyone has one, but no one wants to use anyone else’s.”

— Dan Ariely

67. “What reminds you in your environment about saving? Nothing.”

— Dan Ariely

68. “In terms of the actual curriculum for management education, my own view is very simple-minded: The world is incredibly complex, it changes all the time, and we should not even hope that we could create a general model that accurately describes the world in all its possible states.”

— Dan Ariely

69. “In life we encounter many people who, in some way or another, try to tattoo our faces.”

— Dan Ariely

70. “Acts of honesty are incredibly important for our sense of social morality. And although they are unlikely to make the same sensational news, if we understand social contagion, we must also recognize the importance of publicly promoting outstanding moral acts.”

— Dan Ariely

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

— Dan Ariely

72. “Money are very difficult to think about. So, we think about money as the opportunity cost of money. So, we at some point went to a Toyota dealership and we asked people, what will you not be able to do in the future if you bought this Toyota?”

— Dan Ariely

73. “Put simply, the link between creativity and dishonesty seems related to the ability to tell ourselves stories about how we are doing the right thing, even when we are not. The more creative we are, the more we are able to come up with good stories that help us justify our selfish interests.”

— Dan Ariely

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

— Dan Ariely

75. “Understand that relativity is everywhere, and that we view everything through its lens – rose-colored or otherwise. When you meet someone in a different country or city and it seems that you have magical connection, realize that the enchantment might be limited to the surrounding circumstances.”

— Dan Ariely

76. “None of us always make the best financial decisions.”

— Dan Ariely

77. “People choose to work more if they do it for free or if well-compensated but not if it is compensated with a little money.”

— Dan Ariely

78. “When we save, everybody in the household is just suffering. By having the coin in a visible way, when you scratch, you can say the person that is in charge of the making money for the family is doing the right thing.”

— Dan Ariely

79. “By the time we comprehend and digest information, it is not necessarily a true reflection of reality. Instead, it is our representation of reality, and this is the input we base our decisions on. In essence we are limited to the tools nature has given us, and the natural way in which we make decisions is limited by the quality and accuracy of these tools.”

— Dan Ariely

80. “The people who need to overcome temptation to the highest degree have the hardest time doing it.”

— Dan Ariely

81. “I don’t want to say that the poor are inherently cognitively diminished, but at the end of the day of making difficult, tough decisions, it’s very hard to have the energy to think about things with the right mindset.”

— Dan Ariely

82. “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.”

— Dan Ariely

83. “We have very strong intuitions about all kinds of things – our own ability, how the economy works, how we should pay school teachers. But unless we start testing those intuitions, we’re not going to do better.”

— Dan Ariely

84. “In a world where everyone is behaving honestly, any dishonesty constitutes a big infraction. But, in a world where many people are behaving dishonestly, and the news is filled with stories of their infractions, even big infractions can feel small to the perpetrator.”

— Dan Ariely

85. “If you want a social relationship, go for it, but remember that you have to maintain it under all circumstances.”

— Dan Ariely

86. “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.”

— Dan Ariely

87. “The question, then, is whether the only force that keeps us from carrying out misdeeds is the fear of being seen by others...”

— Dan Ariely

88. “I do believe that an improved understanding of the multiple irrational forces that influence us could be a useful first step toward making better decisions.”

— Dan Ariely

89. “These results show that when we are acknowledged for our work, we are willing to work harder for less pay, and when we are not acknowledged, we lose much of our motivation.”

— Dan Ariely

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

— Dan Ariely

91. “Designers and copywriters were at the top of the moral flexibility scale, and the accountants ranked at the bottom. It seems that when “creativity” is in our job description, we are more likely to say “Go for it” when it comes to dishonest behavior.”

— Dan Ariely

92. “We are all very good at rationalizing our actions so that they are in line with our selfish motives.”

— Dan Ariely

93. “I always found the appeal to the market gods a bit odd. Why would the market fix mistakes instead of aggravating them?”

— Dan Ariely

94. “I don’t know what exactly the translation is but when we do consume something now, something else has to give at some point.”

— Dan Ariely

95. “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.”

— Dan Ariely

96. “What you should do is wait until the end of each month, and then say, “OK, how much money do I have? How much do I need? Let me send the rest to retirement.””

— Dan Ariely

97. “If we can learn to embrace the Homer Simpson within us, with all our flaws and inabilities, and take these into account when we design our schools, health plans, stock markets, and everything else in our environment, I am certain that we can create a much better world. This is the real promise of behavioral economics.”

— Dan Ariely

98. “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?”

— Dan Ariely

99. “Under the school’s disclosure rules, about 1,600 of 8,900 professors and lecturers at Harvard Medical School have reported to the dean that they or a family member had a financial interest in a business related to their teaching, research, or clinical care.”2 When professors publicly pass drug recommendations off as academic knowledge, we have a serious problem.”

— Dan Ariely

100. “Linking financial element to energy consumption I think has a huge role if you think about a display instrument that could teach us about what we are using, how much it costs us, how much it is saving, and therefore change our decisions.”

— Dan Ariely