Top 70 Sheena Iyengar Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Choice is the only tool we have that enables us to go from who we are today to who we want to be tomorrow.”

— Sheena Iyengar

2. “Too many choices can overwhelm us and cause us to not choose at all. For businesses, this means that if they offer us too many choices, we may not buy anything.”

— Sheena Iyengar

3. “What you see determines how you interpret the world, which in turn influences what you expect of the world and how you expect the story of your life to unfold.”

— Sheena Iyengar

4. “What is freedom? Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice. Without the possibility of choice a man is not a man but a member, an instrument, a thing. – Archibald MacLeish.”

— Sheena Iyengar

5. “So gut tells you “How do I feel about this right now?” It doesn’t tell me how I feel about it tomorrow or even a few minutes from now. It just tells me how I’m feeling right now.”

— Sheena Iyengar

6. “Reason tells me, when I do the pros and cons analysis, how I should feel about it right now and how I should feel about it in 10 years from now and so that the only...”

— Sheena Iyengar

7. “We measure our lives using different markers: years, major events, achievements. We can also measure them by the choices we make, the sum total of which has brought us to wherever and whoever we are today.”

— Sheena Iyengar

8. “First-generation children were strongly influenced by their immigrant parents approach to choice. For them, choice was not just a way of defining and asserting their individuality, but a way to create community and harmony by deferring to the choices of people whom they trusted and respected.”

— Sheena Iyengar

9. “In reality, many choices are between things that are not that much different. The value of choice depends on our ability to perceive differences between the options.”

— Sheena Iyengar

10. “The phantasmagoria, the actual experience that we try to understand and organize through narrative, varies from place to place. No single narrative serves the needs of everyone everywhere.”

— Sheena Iyengar

11. “The key to getting the most from choice is to be choosy about choosing.”

— Sheena Iyengar

12. “Like, people are less likely to invest in their retirement when they have more options in their 401K plans than when they have fewer.”

— Sheena Iyengar

13. “What leads us astray is confusing more choices with more control. Because it is not clear that the more choices you have the more in control you feel. We have more choices than we’ve ever had before.”

— Sheena Iyengar

14. “What we share with animals is a desire for choice. It’s a desire to have control over our life and a desire to live and use choice as a way in which we can facilitate our ability to live and that is something we really were born with.”

— Sheena Iyengar

15. “In a conversation with the master jazz musician and Pulitzer Prize–winning composer Wynton Marsalis, he told me, “You need to have some restrictions in jazz. Anyone can improvise with no restrictions, but that’s not jazz. Jazz always has some restrictions. Otherwise it might sound like noise.” The ability to improvise, he said, comes from fundamental knowledge, and this knowledge “limits the choices you can make and will make.”

— Sheena Iyengar

16. “When we speak of choice, what we mean is the ability to exercise control over ourselves and our environment. In order to choose, we must first perceive that control is possible.”

— Sheena Iyengar

17. “So on the one hand in school you’re teachers are constantly telling you that you can be whatever it is you want to be as long as you put your mind and heart to it, and yet at the same time I was also getting the clear message of, well, what can you do really?”

— Sheena Iyengar

18. “As we get older, we get better at choosing in ways that will make us happy. We do a better job at picking activities that make us happy, and at spending time with people who make us happy. We’re also better at letting things go.”

— Sheena Iyengar

19. “Balancing hopes, desires and an appreciating of the possibilities with a clear-eyed assessment of the limitations: that is the art of choosing.”

— Sheena Iyengar

20. “Being a Sikh meant having to do what Mom and Dad said, and going to temple, and Mom and Dad choosing who I would marry. But going to an American school taught me that I was the one who’s supposed to make those choices.”

— Sheena Iyengar

21. “I mean we might even go to war as to whether we love Coke or Pepsi and our whole identity is wrapped up in that choice. You know, for the Russians they felt that these minor differences between these various sodas was just hyped up and irrelevant.”

— Sheena Iyengar

22. “We’re born with the desire, but we don’t really know how to choose. We don’t know what our taste is, and we don’t know what we are seeing.”

— Sheena Iyengar

23. “Choice is more than picking ‘x’ over ‘y.’ It is a responsibility to separate the meaningful and the uplifting from the trivial and the disheartening. It is the only tool we have that enables us to go from who we are today to who we want to be tomorrow.”

— Sheena Iyengar

24. “You know give me choices that are truly different from one another, otherwise they don’t regard them as meaningful choices.”

— Sheena Iyengar

25. “A person of “good character” was one who acted in accordance with the expectations of his community.”

— Sheena Iyengar

26. “You know if they said kindness or funniness was really most important to them then they will be more likely to say yes to the person that they thought was kind and funny.”

— Sheena Iyengar

27. “There is a different attitude about, you know, how much differentiation there needs to be between our options and how many choices do I need to have in order to make a choice.”

— Sheena Iyengar

28. “So for decisions about happiness you essentially need at least both and probably even more than that, you probably also need to do analysis that doesn’t involve yourself to get at the answer of what will make you happy in 10 years.”

— Sheena Iyengar

29. “I don’t know if I approach choice any differently than the sighted people do, but what I am very cognizant of is that choice does have limits and because of that I really try to take advantage of the domains in which I do have choice.”

— Sheena Iyengar

30. “Choosing is a creative process, one through which we construct our environment, our lives, ourselves.”

— Sheena Iyengar

31. “Your enjoyment of the chosen options will be diminished by your regret over what you had to give up. In fact, the sum total of the regret over all the “lost” options may end up being greater than your joy over your chosen options, leaving you less satisfied than you would have been if you had had less choice to begin with.”

— Sheena Iyengar

32. “I put out a good 10 different types of drinks for them and they just said, “Oh, okay, so it’s just one choice.” One choice? I gave you Coke, Pepsi, Ginger Ale, Sprite. They saw that as one choice. Now why was that one choice? Because they felt, well, it was just all soda.”

— Sheena Iyengar

33. “In order to ‘hold fast’ to something, one must allow oneself to be held to something. That commitment may be one of the hardest things to practice in a world of so much choice.”

— Sheena Iyengar

34. “We are often in society told to make decisions in one of two ways. We’re either told “Use your gut, just go with how you feel about it and let that guide you,” or we’re told to use reason – some very deliberative methodical process of pros and cons and really thinking it through.”

— Sheena Iyengar

35. “Also if they choose from more options than fewer options they’re less satisfied with what they choose and that is true whether they’re choosing chocolates or which job offer to accept.”

— Sheena Iyengar

36. “We have the ability to create choice by altering our interpretations of the world.”

— Sheena Iyengar

37. “In America we tell our parents to bring their child home and put him or her in a crib; as they get older, children sleep in they own room not in Mom and Dad’s room. What are we training them for? It’s independence, because that’s what being empowered is all about.”

— Sheena Iyengar

38. “Our beliefs about how much personal control people have over their lives, which are shaped in part by the level of individualism to which we have been exposed, also play an important role in our preferences for allocating choice.”

— Sheena Iyengar

39. “I could wear makeup today, and one person would say it looks bland, another would say it looks fake, and another might tell me I look really natural. Everyone is convinced their opinion is the truth, and that’s what I struggle against.”

— Sheena Iyengar

40. “I mean can you walk to school on your own? Can you study science? Can you study math? Can you go to a normal school? Do you need to go to a special school? What is going to become of you when you grow up? Are you going to have to live on social security and SSI?”

— Sheena Iyengar

41. “Knowledge should be a public good, and I want my ideas to have as much exposure as possible.”

— Sheena Iyengar

42. “My child’s first word was “more,” but and it’s all about, “I want.” “I’m going to tell you what I want and what I don’t want.” It’s about my desire to express my preferences. And that is really innate.”

— Sheena Iyengar

43. “The first thing we looked at, in what case were people more likely to be attracted to the jar or jam, so in which case are people more likely to stop when they saw the display of jams and what we found was that more people stopped when there were 24 jams.”

— Sheena Iyengar

44. “What affected people’s health most in these studies wasn’t the actual level of control that people had in their jobs, but the amount of control they perceived themselves as having.”

— Sheena Iyengar

45. “We either put out 6 different flavors of jam or 24 different flavors of jam and we looked at 2 things. First, in what case were people more likely to buy a jar of jam?”

— Sheena Iyengar

46. “We also don’t always know what we want. And in those cases it can actually make us worse off because it’s actually easier to figure out what you want and to figure out how the options differ if you have about a handful of them than if you have a hundred of them.”

— Sheena Iyengar

47. “I do think that there are cultural differences in the extent to which we value having more and more choice.”

— Sheena Iyengar

48. “When companies try to guess what consumers want, they essentially make the choice for consumers.”

— Sheena Iyengar

49. “We make choices and are in turn made by them.”

— Sheena Iyengar

50. “Now if you expand their choice set. Say you give them 20 different speed dates, everything goes out the window. Everybody starts choosing in accordance with looks because that becomes the easiest criteria by which to weed out all the options and decide “So who am I going to say yes to?””

— Sheena Iyengar