Top 500 Daniel Kahneman Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “A compelling narrative fosters an illusion of inevitability.”

— Daniel Kahneman

52. “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

53. “An investment said to have an 80% chance of success sounds far more attractive than one with a 20% chance of failure. The mind can’t easily recognize that they are the same.”

— Daniel Kahneman

54. “Negotiations over a shrinking pie are especially difficult because they require an allocation of losses. People tend to be much more easygoing when they bargain over an expanding pie.”

— Daniel Kahneman

55. “Highly intelligent women tend to marry men who are less intelligent than they are.”

— Daniel Kahneman

56. “Dawes showed that marital stability is well predicted by a formula: frequency of lovemaking minus frequency of quarrels.”

— Daniel Kahneman

57. “If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do.”

— Daniel Kahneman

58. “If you can’t take the time for a vacation right now, or even a night out with friends, put something on the calendar – even if it’s a month or a year down the road. Then whenever you need a boost of happiness, remind yourself about it.”

— Daniel Kahneman

59. “Mental effort, I would argue, is relatively rare. Most of the time we coast.”

— Daniel Kahneman

60. “The technical definition of heuristic is a simple procedure that helps find adequate, though often imperfect, answers to difficult questions. The.”

— Daniel Kahneman

61. “The brains of humans contain a mechanism that is designed to give priority to bad news.”

— Daniel Kahneman

62. “To understand error in judgment, we must understand both bias and noise.”

— Daniel Kahneman

63. “Slow thinking has the feeling of something you do. It’s deliberate.”

— Daniel Kahneman

64. “Human beings cannot comprehend very large or very small numbers. It would be useful for us to acknowledge that fact.”

— Daniel Kahneman

65. “The world in our heads is not a precise replica of reality; our expectations about the frequency of events are distorted by the prevalence and emotional intensity of the messages to which we are exposed.”

— Daniel Kahneman

66. “If owning stocks is a long-term project for you, following their changes constantly is a very, very bad idea. It’s the worst possible thing you can do, because people are so sensitive to short-term losses. If you count your money every day, you’ll be miserable.”

— Daniel Kahneman

67. “When you look at the books about well-being, you see one word – it’s happiness. People do not distinguish.”

— Daniel Kahneman

68. “When you analyze happiness, it turns out that the way you spend your time is extremely important.”

— Daniel Kahneman

69. “Bad emotions, bad parents, and bad feedback have more impact than good ones, and bad information is processed more thoroughly than good. The.”

— Daniel Kahneman

70. “Whenever we can replace human judgment by a formula, we should at least consider it.”

— Daniel Kahneman

71. “We don’t see very far in the future, we are very focused on one idea at a time, one problem at a time, and all these are incompatible with rationality as economic theory assumes it.”

— Daniel Kahneman

72. “The illusion that one has understood the past feeds the further illusion that one can predict and control the future.”

— Daniel Kahneman

73. “Most successful pundits are selected for being opinionated, because it’s interesting, and the penalties for incorrect predictions are negligible. You can make predictions, and a year later people won’t remember them.”

— Daniel Kahneman

74. “Bias and noise – systematic deviation and random scatter – are different components of error.”

— Daniel Kahneman

75. “Why be concerned with gossip? Because it is much easier, as well as far more enjoyable, to identify and label the mistakes of others than to recognize our own.”

— Daniel Kahneman

76. “A reliable way of making people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.”

— Daniel Kahneman

77. “The premise of this book is that it is easier to recognize other people’s mistakes than your own.”

— Daniel Kahneman

78. “Except for some effects that I attribute mostly to age, my intuitive thinking is just as prone to overconfidence, extreme predictions, and the planning fallacy as it was before I made a study of these issues.”

— Daniel Kahneman

79. “When people think of the outcomes of their decisions, they think much more short term than that. They think in terms of gains and losses.”

— Daniel Kahneman

80. “Intelligence is not only the ability to reason; it is also the ability to find relevant material in memory and to deploy attention when needed.”

— Daniel Kahneman

81. “People like leaders who look like they are dominant, optimistic, friendly to their friends, and quick on the trigger when it comes to enemies. They like boldness and despise the appearance of timidity and protracted doubt.”

— Daniel Kahneman

82. “Spend some effort in figuring out why each decision did or did not pan out. Doing that systematically is key: really try to question the way you make decisions, and improve it.”

— Daniel Kahneman

83. “Examples of the planning fallacy abound in the experiences of individuals, governments, and businesses. The list of horror stories is endless.”

— Daniel Kahneman

84. “Put your ideas in verse if you can; they will be more likely to be taken as truth.”

— Daniel Kahneman

85. “You just like winning and dislike losing – and you almost certainly dislike losing more than you like winning.”

— Daniel Kahneman

86. “To better avoid errors, you should talk to people who disagree with you and you should talk to people who are not in the same emotional situation you are.”

— Daniel Kahneman

87. “Individual investors predictably flock to stocks in companies that are in the news.”

— Daniel Kahneman

88. “If you’re going to be unreligious, it’s likely going to be due to reflecting on it and finding some things that are hard to believe.”

— Daniel Kahneman

89. “Her favorite position is beside herself, and her favorite sport is jumping to conclusions.”

— Daniel Kahneman

90. “We are far too willing to reject the belief that much of what we see in life is random.”

— Daniel Kahneman

91. “The observed regression to the mean cannot be more interesting or more explainable than the imperfect correlation.”

— Daniel Kahneman

92. “I don’t try to be clever at all. The idea that I could see what no one else can is an illusion.”

— Daniel Kahneman

93. “You can see why the common admonition to “act calm and kind regardless of how you feel” is very good advice: you are likely to be rewarded by actually feeling calm and kind.”

— Daniel Kahneman

94. “Every author, I suppose, has in mind a setting in which readers of his or her work could benefit from having read it.”

— Daniel Kahneman

95. “It’s nonsense to say money doesn’t buy happiness, but people exaggerate the extent to which more money can buy more happiness.”

— Daniel Kahneman

96. “We’re not aware of changing our minds even when we do change our minds. And most people, after they change their minds, reconstruct their past opinion – they believe they always thought that.”

— Daniel Kahneman

97. “To derive the most useful information from multiple sources of evidence, you should always try to make these sources independent of each other.”

— Daniel Kahneman

98. “The world makes much less sense than you think. The coherence comes mostly from the way your mind works.”

— Daniel Kahneman

99. “If you were allowed one wish for your child, seriously consider wishing him or her optimism.”

— Daniel Kahneman

100. “It is only a slight exaggeration to say that happiness is the experience of spending time with people you love and who love you.”

— Daniel Kahneman