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

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Popular quotes

“So it's not about what you do. It can't be, can it? It has to be about how you are, how you love, how you treat yourself and those around you, and that's where I get eaten up.”
― Nick Hornby, quote from Juliet, Naked

“when he found her, upstairs in the hall outside her bedchamber, her hair had gone white.
As, it seemed, had the rest of her.
Bloody hell. 'Oliver!' he bellowed. 'Amanda!'
'Oh, they're long gone,' Eloisa bit off. She looked up at him with fuming eyes. Fuming eyes which, he couldn't help but note, were the only part of her not covered with a remarkably thick coating of flour.
Well, good for her for closing them in time. He'd always admired quick reflexes in a woman.
'Miss Bridgerton,' he said, his hand moving forward to help her, then retracting as he realized there *was* no helping her. 'I cannot begin to express-'
'*Don't* apologize for them,' she snapped ...
He took a self-preservational step back. 'I gather the twins paid you a visit,' he said.
'Oh, yes,' she replied, with no small measure of sarcasm. 'And then scampered away. The little cowards themselves are nowhere to be found.'
'Well, they wouldn't be far,' he mused ... 'They'd want to see the results, of course ... I don't suppose you heard any laughter when the flour came down? Cackling, perhaps?' ...
'It was difficult,' she said, so tightly he wondered if her jaw might snap, 'to hear anything but the sound of the bucket hitting my head.”
― Julia Quinn, quote from To Sir Phillip, With Love

“Clearly it was time to consider rescheduling that optometrist appointment I'd missed last fall.”
― Kelley Armstrong, quote from Personal Demon

“Maybe this is all love is and all it will ever be-- boys fucking girls and pretending it's love, girls getting fucked and pretending they like it, saying "I love you, too," and wanting to throw up.”
― Amy Reed, quote from Beautiful

“Vi?" Jag's soft voice called from the other room. I'd been soaking so long, the water in the tub was cold. I stepped out, careful not to get the book wet, and wrapped a towel around myself.
"In here," I whispered. He had switched the lamp on and was rubbing his eyes when I came into the bedroom.
"Hey."
I slipped the book back onto the table next to his bed. "I didn't get it wet."
"Not. That." His eyes raked over my only-towel-covered body with a hungry expression.
"Knock it off." I pulled the towel tighter and returned to the bathroom. He followed me, putting his hand on the door before I could close it. I looked anywhere but at him. Lying fully clothed in bed with him was bad enough.
I couldn't help it when I drank him in, starting at his feet and slowly creeping up to his neck, past his chin, lips, nose to his eyes. When I finally reached them, my heart clutched almost painfully. I swallowed hard and cleared my throat, playing with the end of my towel.
"Vi, babe-"
"Don't talk like that," I said.
He smiled his Jag-winner. I took a shuddering breath and tried to focus. "Don't smile like that either. It's not fair."
"Okay, then. Let's talk about being fair." He carefully wove his fingers through mine. The way he studied the ground was adorable. He took a few slow steps back into the bedroom, pulling me with him.
"Jag-”
― Elana Johnson, quote from Possession

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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.

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