Kahneman Thinking Quotes & Sayings

Which we can live-by — Friedrich Nietzsche

In psychoanalysis as in art, God resided in the details, the discovery of which required enormous patience, unyielding seriousness, and the skill of an acrobat - walking a tightrope over memory and speculation, instinct and theory, feeling and denial. — Judith Perelman Rossner

So what does all this mean if you desperately want to persuade someone who doesn't want to be persuaded?

The first step is to appreciate that your opponent's opinion is likely based less on fact and logic than on ideology and herd thinking. If you were to suggest this to his face, he would of course deny it. He is operating from a set of biases he cannot even see. As the behavioral sage Daniel Kahneman has written: "We can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness." Few of us are immune to this blind spot. That goes for you, and that goes for the two of us as well. And so, as the basketball legend-cum-philosopher Kareem Abdul-Jabbar once put it, "It's easier to jump out of a plane - hopefully with a parachute - than it is to change your mind about an opinion. — Steven D. Levitt

Ten minutes of a smartphone in front of your nose is about the equivalent of an hour long walk in bright daylight. Imagine going for an hour long walk in bright daylight and then thinking, "Now I'll get some sleep." It ain't going to happen. — Daniel Kahneman

I don't need power at the cost of spilled blood. — Viktor Yanukovych

Not all of us were meant to teach,
but all of us were meant to learn.
Not all of us were meant to lead,
but all of us were meant to serve.
Not all of us were meant to be rich,
but all of us were meant to be charitable.
Not all of us were meant to be famous,
but all of us were meant to be upright.
Not all of us were meant to be mighty,
but all of us were meant to persevere.
Not all of us were meant to be extraordinary,
but all of us were meant to prevail. — Matshona Dhliwayo

Control yourself, it is not worth it. You will regret your rudeness afterwards, your sensitive nature will be troubled — Leila Aboulela

Kaitlin said, "I'm so sick of that 'Greatest Generation' crap. We finally drove a silver nail through the heart of Generation X, only to have this new monster rear its head. And I'm soooooo sick of Tom Hanks looking earnest all the time. They should make a Tom Hanks movie where Tom kills off Greatest Generation figureheads one by one."
Bree arrived on cue: "And then he starts killing other generations. He becomes this supernova of hate
all he wants to do is destroy."
"Hate clings to him like a rich, lathery shampoo. His lungs secrete it like anthrax foam."
Mom lost it. "Stop it! All of you! Tom Hanks is a fine actor who would never hurt anybody. At least not onscreen."
I thought, 'Hey, didn't Tom Hanks mow down half of Chicago in "Road to Perdition?"' Well, whatever. — Douglas Coupland

I ain't cynical, Miss Alexandra. Tellin' the truth's not cynical, is it?" "The way you tell it, it is. — Harper Lee

I call it theory-induced blindness: once you have accepted a theory and used it as a tool in your thinking, it is extraordinarily difficult to notice its flaws. If you come upon an observation that does not seem to fit the model, you assume that there must be a perfectly good explanation that you are somehow missing. — 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

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

automatic search for causes shapes our thinking, — Daniel Kahneman

To love very much is to love inadequately; we love-that is all. Love cannot be modified without being nullified. Love is a short word but it contains everything. Love means the body, the soul, the life, the entire being. We feel love as we feel the warmth of our blood, we breathe love as we breathe the air, we hold it in ourselves as we hold our thoughts. Nothing more exists for us. Love is not a word; it is a wordless state indicated by four letters. — Guy De Maupassant

Slow thinking has the feeling of something you do. It's deliberate. — Daniel Kahneman

Children and fooles speake true. — John Lyly

My mother said to me, 'Why do you have to call yourself a dyke? Why can't you be a nice lesbian?' 'Because I'm not a nice lesbian, I'm a big dyke.' — Lea DeLaria

Stories people told themselves were biased by the availability of the material used to construct them...what people remember about the past, [Kahneman and Tversky] suggested, is likely to warp their judgement of the future. "We often decide that an outcome is extremely unlikely or impossible, because we are unable to imagine any chain of events that could cause it to occur. The defect, often, is in our imagination. — Michael Lewis

One of the major biases in risky decision making is optimism. Optimism is a source of high-risk thinking. — Daniel Kahneman

After seeing a movie that dramatizes nuclear war, they worried more about nuclear war; indeed, they felt that it was more likely to happen. The sheer volatility of people's judgement of the odds--their sense of the odds could be changed by two hours in a movie theater--told you something about the reliability of the mechanism that judged those odds. — Michael Lewis

but statistics requires thinking about many things at once, which is something that System 1 is not designed to do. — Daniel Kahneman

Having the best product means nothing if the people won't buy it. — Donald A. Norman

Bo Derek is a really good friend of mine, and I'd like to spend more time with her. — Ray Bradbury

Nothing in life is quite as important as you think it is while you're thinking about it. — Daniel Kahneman

People are very good [at] thinking about agents. The mind is set really beautifully to think about agents. Agents have traits. Agents have behaviors. We understand agents. We form global impression of their personalities. We are really not very good at remembering sentences where the subject of the sentence is an abstract notion. — Daniel Kahneman

Once you have accepted a theory and used it as a tool in your thinking, it is extraordinarily difficult to notice its flaws. — Daniel Kahneman

Our predilection for causal thinking exposes us to serious mistakes in evaluating the randomness of truly random events. — Daniel Kahneman

Nothing in life is as important as you think it is, while you are thinking about it — Daniel Kahneman

There is a deep gap between our thinking about statistics and our thinking about individual cases. Statistical results with a causal interpretation have a stronger effect on our thinking than noncausal information. But even compelling causal statistics will not change long-held beliefs or beliefs rooted in personal experience. On the other hand, surprising individual cases have a powerful impact and are a more effective tool for teaching psychology because the incongruity must be resolved and embedded in a causal story. — Daniel Kahneman

Perserverance is the sibbling of success. — Matshona Dhliwayo

The various causes of ease or strain have interchangeable effects. When you are in a state of cognitive ease, you are probably in a good mood, like what you see, believe what you hear, trust your intuition, and feel that the current situation is comfortably familiar. You are also likely to be relatively casual and superficial in your thinking. When you feel strained, you are more likely to be vigilant and suspicious, invest more effort in what you are doing, feel less comfortable, and make fewer errors, but you also are less intuitive and less creative as usual. — Daniel Kahneman

I say let's respond as best we can to the victims and their families. — William P. Leahy

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. — Daniel Kahneman

Except for some effects that I attribute mostly to age, my intuitive thinking is just as prone to overconfidence, extreme predictions, and the planning fallacy as it was before I made a study of these issues. — Daniel Kahneman

When people think of the outcomes of their decisions, they think much more short term than that. They think in terms of gains and losses. — Daniel Kahneman

The most effortful forms of slow thinking are those that require you to think fast. — Daniel Kahneman

Managers think of themselves as captains of a ship on a stormy sea. Risk for them is danger, but they are fighting it, very controlled. — Daniel Kahneman

Prayer is not an option but a necessity. — Billy Graham

What happens with fear is that probability doesn't matter very much. That is, once I have raised the possibility that something terrible can happen to your child, even though the possibility is remote, you may find it very difficult to think of anything else. Emotion becomes dominant. — Daniel Kahneman