If you’re going to be unreligious, it’s likely going to be due to reflecting on it and finding some things that are hard to believe. – Daniel Kahneman
We’re beautiful devices. The devices work well; we’re all experts in what we do. But when the mechanism fails, those failures can tell you a lot about how the mind works. – Daniel Kahneman
Nothing in life is quite as important as you think it is while you’re thinking about it. – Daniel Kahneman
For many people, commuting is the worst part of the day, and policies that can make commuting shorter and more convenient would be a straightforward way to reduce minor but widespread suffering. – Daniel Kahneman
We know that the French are very different from the Americans in their satisfaction with life. They’re much less satisfied. Americans are pretty high up there, while the French are quite low – the world champions in life satisfaction are actually the Danes. – Daniel Kahneman
If people do not know what is going to make them better off or give them pleasure, then the idea that you can trust people to do what will give them pleasure becomes questionable. – Daniel Kahneman
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
One emphasis of my research has been on the question of how people spend their time. Time is the ultimate finite resource, or course, so the question of how people spend it would seem to be important. – Daniel Kahneman
After a crisis we tell ourselves we understand why it happened and maintain the illusion that the world is understandable. In fact, we should accept the world is incomprehensible much of the time. – Daniel Kahneman
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
In essence, the optimistic style involves taking credit for successes but little blame for failures. – Daniel Kahneman
People are really happier with friends than they are with their families or their spouse or their child. – Daniel Kahneman
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
People like leaders who look like they are dominant, optimistic, friendly to their friends, and quick on the trigger when it comes to enemies. They like boldness and despise the appearance of timidity and protracted doubt. – Daniel Kahneman
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
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
It’s very easy for trusted companies to mislead naive customers, and life insurance companies are trusted. – Daniel Kahneman
My interest in well-being evolved from my interest in decision making – from raising the question of whether people know what they will want in the future and whether the things that people want for themselves will make them happy. – Daniel Kahneman
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
Many ideas happen to us. We have intuition, we have feeling, we have emotion, all of that happens, we don’t decide to do it. We don’t control it. – Daniel Kahneman
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
Alternative descriptions of the same reality evoke different emotions and different associations. – Daniel Kahneman
The brains of humans contain a mechanism that is designed to give priority to bad news. – Daniel Kahneman
Nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it. – Daniel Kahneman
Most of the moments of our life – and I calculated, you know, the psychological present is said to be about three seconds long; that means that, you know, in a life there are about 600 million of them; in a month, there are about 600,000 – most of them don’t leave a trace. – Daniel Kahneman