Quotes from 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, quote from Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Nothing in life is as important as you think it is, while you are thinking about it”
― Daniel Kahneman, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Intelligence is not only the ability to reason; it is also the ability to find relevant material in memory and to deploy attention when needed.”
― Daniel Kahneman, quote from 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, quote from Thinking, Fast and Slow

“The idea that the future is unpredictable is undermined every day by the ease with which the past is explained.”
― Daniel Kahneman, quote from 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, quote from Thinking, Fast and Slow

“A general “law of least effort” applies to cognitive as well as physical
exertion. The law 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.”
― Daniel Kahneman, quote from 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, quote from Thinking, Fast and Slow

“A reliable way of making people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.”
― Daniel Kahneman, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from Thinking, Fast and Slow

“We are prone to overestimate how much we understand about the world and to underestimate the role of chance in events.”
― Daniel Kahneman, quote from Thinking, Fast and Slow

“we can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.”
― Daniel Kahneman, quote from 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, quote from Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Mood evidently affects the operation of System 1: when we are uncomfortable and unhappy, we lose touch with our intuition.
These findings add to the growing evidence that good mood, intuition, creativity, gullibility, and increased reliance on System 1 form a cluster. At the other pole, sadness, vigilance, suspicion, an analytic approach, and increased effort also go together. 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, quote from 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, quote from Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.”
― Daniel Kahneman, quote from Thinking, Fast and Slow

“The illusion that we understand the past fosters overconfidence in our ability to predict the future.”
― Daniel Kahneman, quote from 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, quote from Thinking, Fast and Slow

“People tend to assess the relative importance of
issues by the ease with which they are retrieved from memory—and this is
largely determined by the extent of coverage in the media. Frequently
mentioned topics populate the mind even as others slip away from
awareness. In turn, what the media choose to report corresponds to their
view of what is currently on the public’s mind. It is no accident that
authoritarian regimes exert substantial pressure on independent media.
Because public interest is most easily aroused by dramatic events and by
celebrities, media feeding frenzies are common”
― Daniel Kahneman, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking of it.”
― Daniel Kahneman, quote from 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, quote from Thinking, Fast and Slow

About the author

Popular quotes

“I believed him because the truth is never hard to recognize. Nothing is ever quite so drab and repetitious and forlorn and ludicrous as truth.”
― Budd Schulberg, quote from What Makes Sammy Run?

“I shall tell him that being partly invisible is merely a small aspect of my charm.”
― Colm Tóibín, quote from The Master

“I think when you are born an angel should say to you, hopefully kindly and not in that fake voice of an airline attendant: Here you go on this long, long dream. Don’t even try to wake up. Just let it go until it is over. You will learn many things. Just relax and observe because there just is pain and that’s it mostly and you aren’t going to be able to escape no matter what. Eventually it will all be over anyway. Good Luck.”
― Francesca Lia Block, quote from The Rose and the Beast: Fairy Tales Retold

“The radio has a CD player and a few CDs, but they’re country-western. “I’m not dying to—” I look at one of the CDs, “Shania Twain. Sorry. I could do Patsy Cline or Johnny Cash, but not Shania.”
― Sarah Lyons Fleming, quote from And After

“She'd thought there was no greater connection than destiny decreeing them joined. But there was - the choice they'd made to love each other.”
― Kresley Cole, quote from Sweet Ruin

Interesting books

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.