Quotes from Daniel Kahneman

There's a tendency to look at investments in isolation. Investors focus on the risk of individual securities.

An investment said to have an 80% chance of success sounds far more attractive than one with a 20% chance of failure. The mind can't easily recognize that they are the same.

The amount of success it takes for leaders to become overconfident isn't terribly large.

I think one of the major results of the psychology of decision making is that people's attitudes and feelings about losses and gains are really not symmetric. So we really feel more pain when we lose $10,000 than we feel pleasure when we get $10,000.

We know that the French are very different from the Americans in their satisfaction with life. They're much less satisfied. Americans are pretty high up there, while the French are quite low - the world champions in life satisfaction are actually the Danes.

Courage is willingness to take the risk once you know the odds. Optimistic overconfidence means you are taking the risk because you don't know the odds. It's a big difference.

I have always emphasized the willingness to discard.

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

It's very difficult to distinguish between what a person believes and what they say they believe.

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.

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.

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

We don't see very far in the future, we are very focused on one idea at a time, one problem at a time, and all these are incompatible with rationality as economic theory assumes it.

Most people are highly optimistic most of the time.

If individuals are rational, there is no need to protect them against their own choices.

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

The extra daily social time of 1.7 hours in weekends raises average happiness by about 2%.

When you are under time pressure for a decision, you need to follow intuition.

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.

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

People talk of the new economy and of reinventing themselves in the workplace, and in that sense most of us are less secure.

The average investor's return is significantly lower than market indices due primarily to market timing.

You know, the standard state for people is 'mildly pleasant.' Negative emotions are quite rare, and extremely positive emotions are rare. But people are mildly pleased most of the time, they're mildly tired a lot of the time, and they wish they were somewhere else a substantial part of the time - but mostly they're mildly pleased.

A large portion of the weekend effects is explained by differences in the amount of time spent with friends or family between weekends and weekdays.