The best quotes by the author we have brought to you
“A divorce is like a symphony with a screeching sound at the end—the fact that it ended badly does not mean it was all bad.” (Thinking, Fast and Slow Quotes)
Daniel Kahneman
Thinking, Fast and Slow
“A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact.”
Daniel Kahneman
Thinking, Fast and Slow
“Acquisition of skills requires a regular environment, an adequate opportunity to practice, and rapid and unequivocal feedback about the correctness of thoughts and actions.”
Daniel Kahneman
Thinking, Fast and Slow
“An inability to be guided by a “healthy fear” of bad consequences is a disastrous flaw.”
Daniel Kahneman
Thinking, Fast and Slow
“As cognitive scientists have emphasized in recent years, cognition is embodied; you think with your body, not only with your brain.”
Daniel Kahneman
Thinking, Fast and Slow
“Bad emotions, bad parents, and bad feedback have more impact than good ones, and bad information is processed more thoroughly than good.”
Daniel Kahneman
Thinking, Fast and Slow
“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
Thinking, Fast and Slow
“Confidence is a feeling, which reflects the coherence of the information and the cognitive ease of processing it. It is wise to take admissions of uncertainty seriously, but declarations of high confidence mainly tell you that an individual has constructed a coherent story in his mind, not necessarily that the story is true.”
Daniel Kahneman
Thinking, Fast and Slow
“Do we still remember the question we are trying to answer? Or have we substituted an easier one?”
Daniel Kahneman
Thinking, Fast and Slow
“Experts who acknowledge the full extent of their ignorance may expect to be replaced by more confident competitors, who are better able to gain the trust of clients. An unbiased appreciation of uncertainty is a cornerstone of rationality—but it is not what people and organizations want.”
Daniel Kahneman
Thinking, Fast and Slow
“I call it theory-induced blindness: once you have accepted a theory and used it as a tool in your thinking, it is extraordinarily difficult to notice its flaws. If you come upon an observation that does not seem to fit the model, you assume that there must be a perfectly good explanation that you are somehow missing.”
Daniel Kahneman
Thinking, Fast and Slow
“I have always believed that scientific research is another domain where a form of optimism is essential to success: I have yet to meet a successful scientist who lacks the ability to exaggerate the importance of what he or she is doing, and I believe that someone who lacks a delusional sense of significance will wilt in the face of repeated experiences of multiple small failures and rare successes, the fate of most researchers.”
Daniel Kahneman
Thinking, Fast and Slow
“If a satisfactory answer to a hard question is not found quickly, System 1 will find a related question that is easier and will answer it. I call the operation of answering one question in place of another substitution.”
Daniel Kahneman
Thinking, Fast and Slow
“If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do.”
Daniel Kahneman
Thinking, Fast and Slow
“If you were allowed one wish for your child, seriously consider wishing him or her optimism.”
Daniel Kahneman
Thinking, Fast and Slow
“In a state of flow, however, maintaining focused attention on these absorbing activities requires no exertion of self-control, thereby freeing resources to be directed to the task at hand.”
Daniel Kahneman
Thinking, Fast and Slow
“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.” (Thinking, Fast and Slow Quotes)
Daniel Kahneman
Thinking, Fast and Slow
“It is the consistency of the information that matters for a good story, not its completeness. Indeed, you will often find that knowing little makes it easier to fit everything you know into a coherent pattern.”
Daniel Kahneman
Thinking, Fast and Slow
“Nothing in life is as important as you think it is, while you are thinking about it”
Daniel Kahneman
Thinking, Fast and Slow
“Odd as it may seem, I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me.”
Daniel Kahneman
Thinking, Fast and Slow
“Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.”
Daniel Kahneman
Thinking, Fast and Slow
“People who are cognitively busy are also more likely to make selfish choices, use sexist language, and make superficial judgments in social situations.”
Daniel Kahneman
Thinking, Fast and Slow
“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.”
Daniel Kahneman
Thinking, Fast and Slow
“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
Thinking, Fast and Slow
“The experiencing self does not have a voice. The remembering self is sometimes wrong, but it is the one that keeps score and governs what we learn from living, and it is the one that makes decisions. What we learn from the past is to maximize the qualities of our future memories, not necessarily of our future experience. This is the tyranny of the remembering self.”
Daniel Kahneman
Thinking, Fast and Slow
“The gorilla study illustrates two important facts about our minds: we can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.”
Daniel Kahneman
Thinking, Fast and Slow
“The idea that large historical events are determined by luck is profoundly shocking, although it is demonstrably true.”
Daniel Kahneman
Thinking, Fast and Slow
“The illusion that we understand the past fosters overconfidence in our ability to predict the future.”
Daniel Kahneman
Thinking, Fast and Slow
“The most effortful forms of slow thinking are those that require you to think fast.”
Daniel Kahneman
Thinking, Fast and Slow
“The nervous system consumes more glucose than most other parts of the body, and effortful mental activity appears to be especially expensive in the currency of glucose.”
Daniel Kahneman
Thinking, Fast and Slow
“The premise of this book is that it is easier to recognize other people’s mistakes than our own.”
Daniel Kahneman
Thinking, Fast and Slow
“The psychologist, Paul Rozin, an expert on disgust, observed that a single cockroach will completely wreck the appeal of a bowl of cherries, but a cherry will do nothing at all for a bowl of cockroaches.”
Daniel Kahneman
Thinking, Fast and Slow
“The test of learning psychology is whether your understanding of situations you encounter has changed, not whether you have learned a new fact.”
Daniel Kahneman
Thinking, Fast and Slow
“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.” (Thinking, Fast and Slow Quotes)
Daniel Kahneman
Thinking, Fast and Slow
“The world makes much less sense than you think. The coherence comes mostly from the way your mind works.”
Daniel Kahneman
Thinking, Fast and Slow
“The worse the consequence, the greater the hindsight bias.”
Daniel Kahneman
Thinking, Fast and Slow
“This is the essence of intuitive heuristics: when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.”
Daniel Kahneman
Thinking, Fast and Slow
“Those who avoid the sin of intellectual sloth could be called “engaged.” They are more alert, more intellectually active, less willing to be satisfied with superficially attractive answers, more skeptical about their intuitions.”
Daniel Kahneman
Thinking, Fast and Slow
“To be useful, your beliefs should be constrained by the logic of probability.”
Daniel Kahneman
Thinking, Fast and Slow
“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
Thinking, Fast and Slow
“We are prone to blame decision makers for good decisions that worked out badly and to give them too little credit for successful moves that appear obvious only after the fact.”
Daniel Kahneman
Thinking, Fast and Slow
“We can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.”
Daniel Kahneman
Thinking, Fast and Slow
“We focus on our goal, anchor on our plan, and neglect relevant base rates, exposing ourselves to the planning fallacy. We focus on what we want to do and can do, neglecting the plans and skills of others. Both in explaining the past and in predicting the future, we focus on the causal role of skill and neglect the role of luck. We are therefore prone to an illusion of control. We focus on what we know and neglect what we do not know, which makes us overly confident in our beliefs.”
Daniel Kahneman
Thinking, Fast and Slow
“We know that people can maintain an unshakable faith in any proposition, however absurd, when they are sustained by a community of like-minded believers”
Daniel Kahneman
Thinking, Fast and Slow
“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
Thinking, Fast and Slow
“You are more likely to learn something by finding surprises in your own behavior than by hearing surprising facts about people in general.”
Daniel Kahneman
Thinking, Fast and Slow
“You can do several things at once, but only if they are easy and undemanding.”
Daniel Kahneman
Thinking, Fast and Slow
“You have no compelling moral intuitions to guide you in solving that problem. Your moral feelings are attached to frames, to descriptions of reality rather than to reality itself.”
Daniel Kahneman
Thinking, Fast and Slow
