Top 500 Daniel Kahneman Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “The idea that you can ask one question and it makes the point – well, that wasn’t how psychology was done at the time.”

— Daniel Kahneman

302. “Claims for correct intuitions in an unpredictable situation are self-delusional at best, sometimes worse.”

— Daniel Kahneman

303. “Indeed, there is evidence that people are more likely to be influenced by empty persuasive messages, such as commercials, when they are tired and depleted.”

— Daniel Kahneman

304. “For example, the question “Do you now feel a slight numbness in your left leg?” always prompts quite a few people to report that their left leg does indeed feel a little strange.”

— Daniel Kahneman

305. “People have little idea, by and large, of the investment world. They are convinced they have an advantage.”

— Daniel Kahneman

306. “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

307. “People talk of the new economy and of reinventing themselves in the workplace, and in that sense most of us are less secure.”

— Daniel Kahneman

308. “A happy mood loosens the control of System 2 over performance: when in a good mood, people become more intuitive and more creative but also less vigilant and more prone to logical errors.”

— Daniel Kahneman

309. “In most situations, a direct comparison makes people more careful and more logical. But not always. Sometimes intuition beats logic even when the correct answer stares you in the face.”

— Daniel Kahneman

310. “Risk” does not exist “out there,” independent of our minds and culture, waiting to be measured. Human beings have invented the concept of “risk” to help them understand and cope with the dangers and uncertainties of life. Although these dangers are real, there is no such thing as “real risk” or “objective risk.”

— Daniel Kahneman

311. “The idea that large historical events are determined by luck is profoundly shocking, although it is demonstrably true.”

— Daniel Kahneman

312. “I have always emphasized the willingness to discard.”

— Daniel Kahneman

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

— Daniel Kahneman

314. “Rational or not, fear is painful and debilitating, and policy makers must endeavor to protect the public from fear, not only from real dangers.”

— Daniel Kahneman

315. “As Nassim Taleb has argued, inadequate appreciation of the uncertainty of the environment inevitably leads economic agents to take risks they should avoid. However, optimism is highly valued, socially and in the market; people and firms reward the providers of dangerously misleading information more than they reward truth tellers.”

— Daniel Kahneman

316. “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

317. “There’s a tendency to look at investments in isolation. Investors focus on the risk of individual securities.”

— Daniel Kahneman

318. “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

319. “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

320. “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

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

— Daniel Kahneman

322. “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

323. “Even in modern humans, System 1 takes over in emergencies and assigns total priority to self-protective actions.”

— Daniel Kahneman

324. “Henry Faulds, a Scottish physician, published the first scientific paper suggesting the use of fingerprints as an identification technique.”

— Daniel Kahneman

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

— Daniel Kahneman

326. “The phenomenon we were studying is so common and so important in the everyday world that you should know its name: it is an anchoring effect. It occurs when people consider a particular value for an unknown quantity before estimating that quantity. What happens is one of the most reliable and robust results of experimental psychology: the estimates stay close to the number that people considered – hence the image of an anchor.”

— Daniel Kahneman

327. “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

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

— Daniel Kahneman

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

— Daniel Kahneman

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

— Daniel Kahneman

331. “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

332. “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

333. “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

334. “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

335. “This is the essence of the focusing illusion, which can be described in a single sentence: Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.”

— Daniel Kahneman

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

— Daniel Kahneman

337. “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

338. “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

339. “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

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

— Daniel Kahneman

341. “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

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

— Daniel Kahneman

343. “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

344. “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

345. “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

346. “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

347. “However, the ability to control attention is not simply a measure of intelligence; measures of efficiency in the control of attention predict performance of air traffic controllers and of Israeli Air Force pilots beyond the effects of intelligence.”

— Daniel Kahneman

348. “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

349. “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

350. “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