Top 500 Daniel Kahneman Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “I’m in a very good mood today, and my System 2 is weaker than usual. I should be extra careful.”

— Daniel Kahneman

302. “The aphorisms were judged more insightful when they rhymed than when they did not. Finally, if you quote a source, choose one with a name that is easy to pronounce.”

— Daniel Kahneman

303. “Although Humans are not irrational, they often need help to make more accurate judgments and better decisions, and in some cases policies and institutions can provide that help.”

— Daniel Kahneman

304. “The premise of the session is a short speech: “Imagine that we are a year into the future. We implemented the plan as it now exists. The outcome was a disaster. Please take 5 to 10 minutes to write a brief history of that disaster.”

— Daniel Kahneman

305. “Taleb suggests that we humans constantly fool ourselves by constructing flimsy accounts of the past and believing they are true.”

— Daniel Kahneman

306. “People assign much higher probability to the truth of their opinions than is warranted.”

— Daniel Kahneman

307. “The idea of old age had not come to their conscious awareness, but their actions had changed nevertheless. This remarkable priming phenomenon – the influencing of an action by the idea – is known as the ideomotor effect.”

— Daniel Kahneman

308. “People should be conscious of the large contribution made by anything that gets people together easily in the reduction of loneliness and emotional well-being.”

— Daniel Kahneman

309. “Although professionals are able to extract a considerable amount of wealth from amateurs, few stock pickers, if any, have the skill needed to beat the market consistently, year after year.”

— Daniel Kahneman

310. “A deeper understanding of judgments and choices also requires a richer vocabulary than is available in everyday language. The hope.”

— Daniel Kahneman

311. “Of course, we and our animal cousins are quickly alerted to signs of opportunities to mate or to feed, and advertisers design billboards accordingly.”

— Daniel Kahneman

312. “You can always find an evolutionary quotation for anything. But the question is whether it’s functional, which is not the same as being evolutionary.”

— Daniel Kahneman

313. “We focus on what we know and neglect what we do not know, which makes us overly confident in our beliefs.”

— Daniel Kahneman

314. “Researchers who studied a thousand Dutch vacationers concluded that by far the greatest amount of happiness extracted from the vacation is derived from the anticipation period...”

— Daniel Kahneman

315. “During a mental multiplication, the pupil normally dilated to a large size within a few seconds and stayed large as long as the individual kept working on the problem; it contracted immediately when she found a solution or gave up.”

— Daniel Kahneman

316. “I enjoy being active, but I look forward to the day when I can retire to the Internet.”

— Daniel Kahneman

317. “There is at least one source of occasion noise that we have all noticed: mood.”

— Daniel Kahneman

318. “We do not expect to see regularity produced by a random process, and when we detect what appears to be a rule, we quickly reject the idea that the process is truly random. Random processes produce many sequences that convince people that the process is not random after all.”

— Daniel Kahneman

319. “This remarkable priming phenomenon – the influencing of an action by the idea – is known as the ideomotor effect.”

— Daniel Kahneman

320. “You’re surprised by something, but you don’t really know what surprised you; you recognize someone, but you don’t really know what cues cause you to recognize that person.”

— Daniel Kahneman

321. “Facing a choice, we gave up rationality rather than give up the enterprise.”

— Daniel Kahneman

322. “I decided to evaluate my portfolio only once a quarter. I am too loss averse to make sensible decisions in the face of daily price fluctuations.”

— Daniel Kahneman

323. “Questioning what we believe and want is difficult at the best of times, and especially difficult when we most need to do it, but we can benefit from the informed opinions of others.”

— Daniel Kahneman

324. “You know you have made a theoretical advance when you can no longer reconstruct why you failed for so long to see the obvious. Still, it took us years to explore the implications of thinking about outcomes as gains and losses.”

— Daniel Kahneman

325. “The extra daily social time of 1.7 hours in weekends raises average happiness by about 2%.”

— Daniel Kahneman

326. “My experience is that I can think while strolling but cannot engage in mental work that imposes a heavy load on short-term memory.”

— Daniel Kahneman

327. “In simple words, prospect theory cannot deal with disappointment.”

— Daniel Kahneman

328. “Irrational is a strong word, which connotes impulsivity, emotionality, and a stubborn resistance to reasonable argument.”

— Daniel Kahneman

329. “A correlation of .30 implies that you would find the stronger CEO leading the stronger firm in about 60% of the pairs – an improvement of a mere 10 percentage points over random guessing, hardly grist for the hero worship of CEOs we so often witness.”

— Daniel Kahneman

330. “Religious participation also has relatively greater favorable impact on both positive affect and stress reduction than on life evaluation. Surprisingly, however, religion provides no reduction of feelings of depression or worry.”

— Daniel Kahneman

331. “I found in the collaboration was that Amos frequently saw the point of my vague ideas much more clearly than I did.”

— Daniel Kahneman

332. “In the unlikely event of this book being made into a film, System 2 would be a supporting character who believes herself to be the hero.”

— Daniel Kahneman

333. “It was always assumed I would be a professor. I grew up thinking it.”

— Daniel Kahneman

334. “Hindsight bias has pernicious effects on the evaluations of decision makers. It leads observers to assess the quality of a decision not by whether the process was sound but by whether its outcome was good or bad.”

— Daniel Kahneman

335. “Charge the loss to your mental account of ‘general revenue’ – you will feel better!”

— Daniel Kahneman

336. “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. We often fail to allow for the possibility that evidence that should be critical to our judgment is missing – what we see is all there is.”

— Daniel Kahneman

337. “A general limitation of the human mind is its imperfect ability to reconstruct past states of knowledge, or beliefs that have changed.”

— Daniel Kahneman

338. “In the absence of a competing intuition, logic prevails.”

— Daniel Kahneman

339. “As you become skilled in a task, its demand for energy diminishes. Studies of the brain have shown that the pattern of activity associated with an action changes as skill increases, with fewer brain regions involved. Talent has similar effects. Highly intelligent individuals need less effort to solve the same problems, as indicated by both pupil size and brain activity.”

— Daniel Kahneman

340. “Nick Epley and Tom Gilovich found evidence that adjustment is a deliberate attempt to find reasons to move away from the anchor:.”

— Daniel Kahneman

341. “Cognitive ease is both a cause and a consequence of a pleasant feeling.”

— Daniel Kahneman

342. “Sentencing a felon is not a prediction. It is an evaluative judgment that seeks to match the sentence to the severity of the crime.”

— Daniel Kahneman

343. “They keep making the same mistake: predicting rare events from weak evidence. When the evidence is weak, one should stick with the base rates.”

— Daniel Kahneman

344. “From the perspective of noise reduction, a singular decision is a recurrent decision that happens only once. Whether you make a decision only once or a hundred times, your goal should be to make it in a way that reduces both bias and noise. And practices that reduce error should be just as effective in your one-of-a-kind decisions as in your repeated ones.”

— Daniel Kahneman

345. “Peak-end rule: The global retrospective rating was well predicted by the average of the level of pain reported at the worst moment of the experience and at its end. Duration neglect: The duration of the procedure had no effect whatsoever on the ratings of total pain.”

— Daniel Kahneman

346. “The sense-making machinery of System 1 makes us see the world as more tidy, simple, predictable, and coherent than it really is. The illusion that one has understood the past feeds the further illusion that one can predict and control the future.”

— Daniel Kahneman

347. “Unlike cognitive load, ego depletion is at least in part a loss of motivation. After exerting self-control in one task, you do not feel like making an effort in another, although you could do it if you really had to. In.”

— Daniel Kahneman

348. “An important advance is that emotion now looms much larger in our understanding of intuitive judgments and choices than it did in the past. The executive’s decision would today be described as an example of the affect heuristic, where judgments and decisions are guided directly by feelings of liking and disliking, with little deliberation or reasoning.”

— Daniel Kahneman

349. “I had stumbled onto a significant fact of the human condition: the feedback to which life exposes us is perverse. Because we tend to be nice to other people when they please us and nasty when they do not, we are statistically punished for being nice and rewarded for being nasty.”

— Daniel Kahneman

350. “The halo effect discussed earlier contributes to coherence, because it inclines us to match our view of all the qualities of a person to our judgment of one attribute that is particularly significant. If.”

— Daniel Kahneman