The Art of Choosing QUOTES

1 " We make choices and are in turn made by them. "

― Sheena Iyengar , The Art of Choosing

2 " For animals, the confinement of the body is the confinement of the whole being, but a person can choose freedom even when he has no physical autonomy. In order to do so, he must know what choice is, and he must believe that he deserves it. By sharing stories, we keep choice alive in the imagination and in language. We give each other the strength to perform choice in the mind even when we cannot perform it with the body. "

― Sheena Iyengar , The Art of Choosing

3 " One could even argue that we have a duty to create and pass on stories about choice because once a person knows such stories, they can’t be taken away from him. He may lose his possessions, his home, his loved ones, but if he holds on to a story about choice, he retains the ability to practice choice. "

― Sheena Iyengar , The Art of Choosing

4 " Whether we do it consciously or subconsciously, we tend to organize our lives to display our identity as accurately as possible. Our lifestyle choices often reveal our values, or at least what we’d like people to perceive as our values…as we make our everyday choices, we continuously calculate not just which choices best match who we are and what we want but also how those choices will be interpreted by others. We look for cues in our social environment to figure out what others think of this or that, which can require being sensitive to the most localized and up-to-date details of what a particular choice means. "

― Sheena Iyengar , The Art of Choosing

5 " The quality of health care continues to improve, and people are living longer, but these developments mean that we’re likely to eventually find ourselves in a situation in which we’re forced to make difficult choices about our parents, other loved ones, or even ourselves that ultimately boil down to calculations of worth and value. "

― Sheena Iyengar , The Art of Choosing

6 " Like the swimming rats in Richter’s experiment, we can survive for only so long without solid ground beneath our feet; if the choices aren’t real, sooner or later we will go under. It’s important, therefore, that we examine our assumptions about choice and that we openly discuss how, when and why it falls short. "

― Sheena Iyengar , The Art of Choosing

7 " At its best, choice is a means by which we can resist the people and the systems that seek to exert control over us. But choice itself can become oppressive when we insist that it is equally available to all. It can become an excuse for ignoring inequities that stem from gender or class or ethnic differences, for example, because one can blithely say, “oh, but they had a choice! We all have choices. "

― Sheena Iyengar , The Art of Choosing

8 " When the options are few, we can be happy with what we choose since we are confident that it is the best possible choice for us. When the options are practically infinite, though, we believe that the perfect choice for us must be out there somewhere and that it’s our responsibility to find it. Choosing can become a lose-lose situation: if we make a choice quickly without fully exploring the available options, we’ll regret potentially missing out on something better; if we do exhaustively consider all the options, we’ll expend more effort (which won’t necessarily increase the quality of our final choice), and if we discover other good options, we may regret that we can’t choose them all. "

― Sheena Iyengar , The Art of Choosing

9 " Erich Fromm in his 1941 book "Escape from Freedom", about the nature of one of our culture’s most cherished values. Fromm argues that freedom is composed of two complementary parts. A common view of freedom is that it means "freedom from the political, economic, and spiritual shackles that have bound men,” which defines it as the absence of others forcibly interfering with the pursuit of our goals. In contrast to this “freedom from,” Fromm identifies an alternate sense of freedom as an ability: the “freedom to” attain certain outcomes and realize our full potential. “Freedom from” and “freedom to” don’t always go together, but one must be free in both senses to obtain full benefit from choice. A child may be allowed to have a cookie, but he won’t get it if he can’t reach the cookie jar high on the shelf. "

― Sheena Iyengar , The Art of Choosing

10 " 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 , The Art of Choosing

11 " The great artist Michelangelo claimed that his sculptures were already present in the stone, and all he had to do was carve away everything else.
Our understanding of identity is often similar: Beneath the many layers of shoulds and shouldn’ts that cover us, there lies a constant, single, true self that is just waiting to be discovered. "

― Sheena Iyengar , The Art of Choosing

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

― Sheena Iyengar , The Art of Choosing

13 " Your choices of which clothes to wear or which soda to drink, where you live, which school to attend and what to study, and of course your profession all say something about you, and it’s your job to make sure that they are an accurate reflection of who you really are.
But who are you, really? The imperative “Just be yourself!” seems straightforward enough. (What could be easier than being who you already are?) Yet we often end up blinking in its headlights, perhaps frozen in place by the concomitant notion that we might, if we are not careful, turn into someone else. It’s difficult to move forward when each step could move us further away from the “authentic” self, and so we dither. "

― Sheena Iyengar , The Art of Choosing

14 " It's easy to assume people are conforming when we witness them all choosing the same option, but when we choose that very option ourselves, we have no shortage of perfectly good reasons for why we just happen to be doing the same thing as those other people; they mindlessly conform, but we mindfully choose. This doesn't mean that we're all conformists in denial. It means that we regularly fail to recognize that others' thoughts and behaviors are just as complex and varied as our own. Rather than being alone in a crowd of sheep, we're all individuals in sheep's clothing. "

― Sheena Iyengar , The Art of Choosing

15 " when people are given a moderate number of options (4 to 6) rather than a large number (20 to 30), they are more likely to make a choice, are more confident in their decisions, and are happier with what they choose. "

― Sheena Iyengar , The Art of Choosing

16 " 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 , The Art of Choosing

17 " life has a way of poking holes in your plans, or in the plans others make for you "

― Sheena Iyengar , The Art of Choosing

18 " no matter how prepared we are, though , we can still have the wind knocked out of us. "

― Sheena Iyengar , The Art of Choosing

19 " valuing the condition of having options over the quality of the options can sometimes lead to decisions that don’t serve us well. "

― Sheena Iyengar , The Art of Choosing

20 " The challenges we face when it comes to identity and choice exist precisely because choosing is not only a private activity but a social one, a negotiation between many moving parts. Choice requires us to think more deeply about who we are, both within ourselves and in the eyes of others. "

― Sheena Iyengar , The Art of Choosing