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.

My impression is that the elimination of memories greatly reduces the value of the experience.

Most successful pundits are selected for being opinionated, because it's interesting, and the penalties for incorrect predictions are negligible. You can make predictions, and a year later people won't remember them.

Hindsight bias makes surprises vanish.

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.

Most of the time, we think fast. And most of the time we're really expert at what we're doing, and most of the time, what we do is right.

Friends are sometimes a big help when they share your feelings. In the context of decisions, the friends who will serve you best are those who understand your feelings but are not overly impressed by them.

There's a lot of randomness in the decisions that people make.

It doesn't take many observations to think you've spotted a trend, and it's probably not a trend at all.

Alternative descriptions of the same reality evoke different emotions and different associations.

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

Poverty is clearly one source of emotional suffering, but there are others, like loneliness. A policy to reduce the loneliness of the elderly would certainly reduce suffering.

We're generally overconfident in our opinions and our impressions and judgments.

In a rising market, enough of your bad ideas will pay off so that you'll never learn that you should have fewer ideas.

I'm not a great believer in self-help.

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

The experiencing self lives in the moment; it is the one that answers the question, 'Does it hurt?' or 'What were you thinking about just now?' The remembering self is the one that answers questions about the overall evaluation of episodes or periods of one's life, such as a stay in the hospital or the years since one left college.

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.

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

Happiness is determined by factors like your health, your family relationships and friendships, and above all by feeling that you are in control of how you spend your time.