Top 500 Daniel Kahneman Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

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

— Daniel Kahneman

103. “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

104. “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

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

— Daniel Kahneman

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

— Daniel Kahneman

107. “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

108. “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

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

— Daniel Kahneman

110. “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

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

— Daniel Kahneman

112. “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

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

— Daniel Kahneman

114. “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

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

— Daniel Kahneman

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

— Daniel Kahneman

117. “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

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

— Daniel Kahneman

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

— Daniel Kahneman

120. “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

121. “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

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

— Daniel Kahneman

123. “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

124. “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

125. “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

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

— Daniel Kahneman

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

— Daniel Kahneman

128. “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

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

— Daniel Kahneman

130. “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

131. “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

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

— Daniel Kahneman

133. “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

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

— Daniel Kahneman

135. “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

136. “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

137. “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

138. “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

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

— Daniel Kahneman

140. “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

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

— Daniel Kahneman

142. “Some memories come with a very compelling sense of truth about them. And that happens to be the case even with memories that are not true.”

— Daniel Kahneman

143. “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

144. “Most things that couples disagree upon aren’t worth more than a day’s combat...”

— Daniel Kahneman

145. “A recurrent theme of this book is that luck plays a large role in every story of success;.”

— Daniel Kahneman

146. “Organizations may be better able to tame optimism than individuals are.”

— Daniel Kahneman

147. “Intuitive diagnosis is reliable when people have a lot of relevant feedback. But people are very often willing to make intuitive diagnoses even when they’re very likely to be wrong.”

— Daniel Kahneman

148. “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

149. “The sunk-cost fallacy keeps people for too long in poor jobs, unhappy marriages, and unpromising research projects. I have often observed young scientists struggling to salvage a doomed project when they would be better advised to drop it and start a new one. Fortunately, research suggests that at least in some contexts the fallacy can be overcome. The.”

— Daniel Kahneman

150. “The concept of happiness has to be reorganised.”

— Daniel Kahneman