Daniel Kahneman

“The brains of humans contain a mechanism that is designed to give priority to bad news.”

“Yes, there is a burden of financial insecurity. I don't think you find it in mood. Income is correlated with life satisfaction, so maybe you do find it in life satisfaction. You don't find it in mood, and I think it is very important.”

“The idea that the future is unpredictable is undermined every day by the ease with which the past is explained.”

“The law (of least effort) asserts that if there are several ways of achieving the same goal, people will eventually gravitate to the least demanding course of action. In the economy of action, effort is a cost, and the acquisition of skill is driven by the balance of benefits and costs. Laziness is built deep into our nature.”

“Most important, of course, we all care intensely for the narrative of our own life and very much want it to be a good story, with a decent hero.”

“Intuitive diagnosis is reliable when people have a lot of relevant feedback. But people are very often willing to make intuitive diagnoses even when they're very likely to be wrong.”

“Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.”

“There are domains in which expertise is not possible. Stock picking is a good example. And in long-term political strategic forecasting, it's been shown that experts are just not better than a dice-throwing monkey.”

“People are very complex. And for a psychologist, you get fascinated by the complexity of human beings, and that is what I have lived with, you know, in my career all of my life, is the complexity of human beings.”

“The experiencing self lives its life continuously. It has moments of experience, one after the other.”

“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.”

“Jumping to conclusions is efficient if the conclusions are likely to be correct and the costs of an occasional mistake acceptable. Jumping to conclusions is risky when the situation is unfamiliar, the stakes are high and there is no time to collect more information.”

“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.”

“Negotiations over a shrinking pie are especially difficult because they require an allocation of losses. People tend to be much more easygoing when they bargain over an expanding pie.”

“Adaptation seems to be, to a substantial extent, a process of reallocating your attention.”

“If there is time to reflect, slowing down is likely to be a good idea.”

“Through some combination of culture and biology, our minds are intuitively receptive to religion.”

“When you analyze happiness, it turns out that the way you spend your time is extremely important.”

“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.”

“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.”