Top 500 Daniel Kahneman Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Nothing in life is quite as important as you think it is while you’re thinking about it.”

— Daniel Kahneman

2. “We can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.”

— Daniel Kahneman

3. “The confidence people have in their beliefs is not a measure of the quality of evidence but of the coherence of the story the mind has managed to construct.”

— Daniel Kahneman

4. “True intuitive expertise is learned from prolonged experience with good feedback on mistakes.”

— Daniel Kahneman

5. “Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.”

— Daniel Kahneman

6. “Money does not buy you happiness, but lack of money certainly buys you misery.”

— Daniel Kahneman

7. “It’s a wonderful thing to be optimistic. It keeps you healthy and it keeps you resilient.”

— Daniel Kahneman

8. “Odd as it may seem, I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me.”

— Daniel Kahneman

9. “The concept of loss aversion is certainly the most significant contribution of psychology to behavioral economics.”

— Daniel Kahneman

10. “The most effortful forms of slow thinking are those that require you to think fast.”

— Daniel Kahneman

11. “A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact.”

— Daniel Kahneman

12. “The sunk-cost fallacy keeps people for too long in poor jobs, unhappy marriages, and unpromising research projects.”

— Daniel Kahneman

13. “One of the major biases in risky decision making is optimism. Optimism is a source of high-risk thinking.”

— Daniel Kahneman

14. “Establish a closing ritual. Know when to stop working. Try to end each work day the same way, too. Straighten up your desk. Back up your computer. Make a list of what you need to do tomorrow.”

— Daniel Kahneman

15. “We don’t choose between experiences, we choose between memories of experiences. Even when we think about the future, we don’t think of our future normally as experiences. We think of our future as anticipated memories.”

— Daniel Kahneman

16. “Courage is willingness to take the risk once you know the odds. Optimistic overconfidence means you are taking the risk because you don’t know the odds. It’s a big difference.”

— Daniel Kahneman

17. “The planning fallacy is that you make a plan, which is usually a best-case scenario. Then you assume that the outcome will follow your plan, even when you should know better.”

— Daniel Kahneman

18. “Hindsight bias makes surprises vanish.”

— Daniel Kahneman

19. “Mind is a machine for jumping to conclusions.”

— Daniel Kahneman

20. “The conclusion is straightforward : self-control requires attention and effort.”

— Daniel Kahneman

21. “We can’t live in a state of perpetual doubt, so we make up the best story possible and we live as if the story were true.”

— Daniel Kahneman

22. “Laziness is built deep into our nature.”

— Daniel Kahneman

23. “Acquisition of skills requires a regular environment, an adequate opportunity to practice, and rapid and unequivocal feedback about the correctness of thoughts and actions.”

— Daniel Kahneman

24. “The psychologist, Paul Rozin, an expert on disgust, observed that a single cockroach will completely wreck the appeal of a bowl of cherries, but a cherry will do nothing at all for a bowl of cockroaches.”

— Daniel Kahneman

25. “Endlessly amused by people’s minds.”

— Daniel Kahneman

26. “There are domains in which expertise is not possible. Stock picking is a good example. And in long-term political strategic forecasting, it’s been shown that experts are just not better than a dice-throwing monkey.”

— Daniel Kahneman

27. “The dominance of conclusions over arguments is most pronounced where emotions are involved.”

— Daniel Kahneman

28. “If there is time to reflect, slowing down is likely to be a good idea.”

— Daniel Kahneman

29. “This is the essence of intuitive heuristics: when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.”

— Daniel Kahneman

30. “It doesn’t take many observations to think you’ve spotted a trend, and it’s probably not a trend at all.”

— Daniel Kahneman

31. “The idea that the future is unpredictable is undermined every day by the ease with which the past is explained.”

— Daniel Kahneman

32. “Clearly, the decision-making that we rely on in society is fallible. It’s highly fallible, and we should know that.”

— Daniel Kahneman

33. “What you see is all there is.”

— Daniel Kahneman

34. “The ‘Instagram Generation’ now experiences the present as an anticipated memory.”

— Daniel Kahneman

35. “By their very nature, heuristic shortcuts will produce biases, and that is true for both humans and artificial intelligence, but the heuristics of AI are not necessarily the human ones.”

— Daniel Kahneman

36. “We have no reason to expect the quality of intuition to improve with the importance of the problem. Perhaps the contrary: high-stake problems are likely to involve powerful emotions and strong impulses to action.”

— Daniel Kahneman

Featured in: Strong Quotes

37. “Economists think about what people ought to do. Psychologists watch what they actually do.”

— Daniel Kahneman

38. “My advice to students when I taught negotiations was that if you think the other side has made an outrageous proposal, you should not come back with an equally outrageous counteroffer, creating a gap that will be difficult to bridge in further negotiations. Instead you should make a scene, storm out or threaten to do so, and make it clear – to yourself as well as to the other side – that you will not continue the negotiation with that number on the table.”

— Daniel Kahneman

39. “The illusion that we understand the past fosters overconfidence in our ability to predict the future.”

— Daniel Kahneman

40. “You think with your body, not with your brain.”

— Daniel Kahneman

41. “It is the consistency of the information that matters for a good story, not its completeness. Indeed, you will often find that knowing little makes it easier to fit everything you know into a coherent pattern.”

— Daniel Kahneman

42. “All of us would be better investors if we just made fewer decisions.”

— Daniel Kahneman

43. “Researchers who pick too small a sample leave themselves at the mercy of sampling luck.”

— Daniel Kahneman

44. “A good mood is a signal that things are generally going well, the environment is safe, and it is all right to let one’s guard down. A bad mood indicates that things are not going very well, there may be a threat, and vigilance is required. Cognitive ease is both a cause and a consequence of a pleasant feeling.”

— Daniel Kahneman

45. “A compelling narrative fosters an illusion of inevitability.”

— Daniel Kahneman

46. “We associate leadership with decisiveness. That perception of leadership pushes people to make decisions fairly quickly, lest they be seen as dithering and indecisive.”

— Daniel Kahneman

47. “Happiness is determined by factors like your health, your family relationships and friendships, and above all by feeling that you are in control of how you spend your time.”

— Daniel Kahneman

48. “If people are failing, they look inept. If people are succeeding, they look strong and good and competent. That’s the ‘halo effect.’ Your first impression of a thing sets up your subsequent beliefs. If the company looks inept to you, you may assume everything else they do is inept.”

— Daniel Kahneman

Featured in: Strong Quotes

49. “A stupid decision that works out well becomes a brilliant decision in hindsight.”

— Daniel Kahneman

50. “The confidence that individuals have in their beliefs depends mostly on the quality of the story they can tell about what they see, even if they see little.”

— Daniel Kahneman