Top 500 Daniel Kahneman Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “Poverty is clearly one source of emotional suffering, but there are others, like loneliness. A policy to reduce the loneliness of the elderly would certainly reduce suffering.”

— Daniel Kahneman

102. “If individuals are rational, there is no need to protect them against their own choices.”

— Daniel Kahneman

103. “When people believe a conclusion is true, they are also very likely to believe arguments that appear to support it, even when these arguments are unsound.”

— Daniel Kahneman

104. “The easiest way to increase happiness is to control your use of time. Can you find more time to do the things you enjoy doing?”

— Daniel Kahneman

105. “Baumeister’s group has repeatedly found that an effort of will or self-control is tiring; if you have had to force yourself to do something, you are less willing or less able to exert self-control when the next challenge comes around. The phenomenon has been named ego depletion. In.”

— Daniel Kahneman

106. “First, people are generally rational, and their thinking is normally sound. Second, emotions such as fear, affection, and hatred explain most of the occasions on which people depart from rationality.”

— Daniel Kahneman

107. “Optimism is normal, but some fortunate people are more optimistic than the rest of us. If you are genetically endowed with an optimistic bias, you hardly need to be told that you are a lucky person – you already feel fortunate.”

— Daniel Kahneman

108. “A person who has not made peace with his losses is likely to accept gambles that would be unacceptable to him otherwise.”

— Daniel Kahneman

109. “The worse the consequence, the greater the hindsight bias.”

— Daniel Kahneman

110. “Facts that challenge basic assumptions-and thereby threaten people’s livelihood and self-esteem-are simply not absorbed. The mind does not digest them.”

— Daniel Kahneman

111. “One thing we have lost, that we had in the past, is a sense of progress, that things are getting better. There is a sense of volatility, but not of progress.”

— Daniel Kahneman

112. “Friends are sometimes a big help when they share your feelings. In the context of decisions, the friends who will serve you best are those who understand your feelings but are not overly impressed by them.”

— Daniel Kahneman

113. “Considering how little we know, the confidence we have in our beliefs is preposterous – and it is also essential.”

— Daniel Kahneman

114. “What happens with fear is that probability doesn’t matter very much. That is, once I have raised the possibility that something terrible can happen to your child, even though the possibility is remote, you may find it very difficult to think of anything else. Emotion becomes dominant.”

— Daniel Kahneman

115. “How many animals of each kind did Moses take into the ark?”

— Daniel Kahneman

116. “We have associations to things. We have, you know, we have associations to tables and to – and to dogs and to cats and to Harvard professors, and that’s the way the mind works. It’s an association machine.”

— Daniel Kahneman

117. “We’re generally overconfident in our opinions and our impressions and judgments.”

— Daniel Kahneman

118. “Framing effects: Different ways of presenting the same information often evoke different emotions. The statement that “the odds of survival one month after surgery are 90%” is more reassuring than the equivalent statement that “mortality within one month of surgery is 10%.” Similarly, cold.”

— Daniel Kahneman

119. “In an article titled “Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly,” he showed that couching familiar ideas in pretentious language is taken as a sign of poor intelligence and low credibility.”

— Daniel Kahneman

120. “Divorced women, compared to married women, are less satisfied with their lives, which is not surprising. But they’re actually more cheerful, when you look at the average mood they’re in in the course of the day.”

— Daniel Kahneman

121. “The evidence suggests that optimism is widespread, stubborn, and costly.”

— Daniel Kahneman

122. “Optimistic people play a disproportionate role in shaping our lives. Their decisions make a difference; they are inventors, entrepreneurs, political and military leaders – not average people. They got to where they are by seeking challenges and taking risks.”

— Daniel Kahneman

123. “Through some combination of culture and biology, our minds are intuitively receptive to religion.”

— Daniel Kahneman

124. “The evidence is unequivocal, there’s a great deal more luck than skill in people getting very rich.”

— Daniel Kahneman

125. “Jumping to conclusions is efficient if the conclusions are likely to be correct and the costs of an occasional mistake acceptable, and if the jump saves much time and effort.”

— Daniel Kahneman

126. “The stubbornness of an intelligent person is seen as likely to be justified and may actually evoke respect, but intelligence in an envious and stubborn person makes him more dangerous.”

— Daniel Kahneman

127. “More advice: if your message is to be printed, use high-quality paper to maximize the contrast between characters and their background. If you use color, you are more likely to be believed if your text is printed in bright blue or red than in middling shades of green, yellow, or pale blue.”

— Daniel Kahneman

128. “Nobody would say, ‘I’m voting for this guy because he’s got the stronger chin,’ but that, in fact, is partly what happens.”

— Daniel Kahneman

129. “Often, the most enjoyable part of an activity is the anticipation.”

— Daniel Kahneman

130. “Many people find the priming results unbelievable, because they do not correspond to subjective experience. Many others find the results upsetting, because they threaten the subjective sense of agency and autonomy. If the content of a screen saver on an irrelevant computer can affect your willingness to help strangers without your being aware of it, how free are you? Anchoring.”

— Daniel Kahneman

131. “Caring for people often takes the form of concern for the quality of their stories, not for their feelings.”

— Daniel Kahneman

132. “Evaluating people as attractive or not is a basic assessment. You do that automatically whether or not you want to, and it influences you.”

— Daniel Kahneman

133. “People are really happier with friends than they are with their families or their spouse or their child.”

— Daniel Kahneman

134. “Ten minutes of a smartphone in front of your nose is about the equivalent of an hour long walk in bright daylight. Imagine going for an hour long walk in bright daylight and then thinking, “Now I’ll get some sleep.” It ain’t going to happen.”

— Daniel Kahneman

135. “The only test of rationality is not whether a person’s beliefs and preferences are reasonable, but whether they are internally consistent.”

— Daniel Kahneman

136. “People who experience flow describe it as “a state of effortless concentration so deep that they lose their sense of time, of themselves, of their problems,” and their descriptions of the joy of that state are so compelling that Csikszentmihalyi has called it an “optimal experience.”

— Daniel Kahneman

137. “Experienced happiness refers to your feelings, to how happy you are as you live your life. In contrast, the satisfaction of the remembering self refers to your feelings when you think about your life.”

— Daniel Kahneman

138. “Our memory tells us stories, that is, what we get to keep from our experiences is a story.”

— Daniel Kahneman

139. “In a rising market, enough of your bad ideas will pay off so that you’ll never learn that you should have fewer ideas.”

— Daniel Kahneman

140. “Each additional day together is a gift. The end of the day means the end of hostilities, the recognition that the underlying shared values and commitment to the relationship trump the need for one last dig or self-righteous justification.”

— Daniel Kahneman

141. “Survival prospects are poor for an animal that is not suspicious of novelty.”

— Daniel Kahneman

142. “Employers who violate rules of fairness are punished by reduced productivity, and merchants who follow unfair pricing policies can expect to lose sales.”

— Daniel Kahneman

143. “So your emotional state really has a lot to do with what you’re thinking about and what you’re paying attention to.”

— Daniel Kahneman

144. “Most people are highly optimistic most of the time.”

— Daniel Kahneman

145. “We have a very narrow view of what is going on.”

— Daniel Kahneman

146. “All of us roughly know what memory is. I mean, memory is sort of the storage of the past. It’s the storage of our personal experiences. It’s a very big deal.”

— Daniel Kahneman

147. “Whether professionals have a chance to develop intuitive expertise depends essentially on the quality and speed of feedback, as well as on sufficient opportunity to practice.”

— Daniel Kahneman

148. “People just hate the idea of losing. Any loss, even a small one, is just so terrible to contemplate that they compensate by buying insurance, including totally absurd policies like air travel.”

— Daniel Kahneman

149. “Familiarity breeds liking. This is a mere exposure effect.”

— Daniel Kahneman

150. “The premortem has two main advantages: it overcomes the groupthink that affects many teams once a decision appears to have been made, and it unleashes the imagination of knowledgeable individuals in a much-needed direction.”

— Daniel Kahneman