It's a wonderful thing to be optimistic. It keeps you healthy and it keeps you resilient.

True intuitive expertise is learned from prolonged experience with good feedback on mistakes.

We're blind to our blindness. We have very little idea of how little we know. We're not designed to know how little we know.

Optimism is normal, but some fortunate people are more optimistic than the rest of us. If you are genetically endowed with an optimistic bias, you hardly need to be told that you are a lucky person - you already feel fortunate.

By their very nature, heuristic shortcuts will produce biases, and that is true for both humans and artificial intelligence, but the heuristics of AI are not necessarily the human ones.

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

Experienced happiness refers to your feelings, to how happy you are as you live your life. In contrast, the satisfaction of the remembering self refers to your feelings when you think about your life.

The planning fallacy is that you make a plan, which is usually a best-case scenario. Then you assume that the outcome will follow your plan, even when you should know better.

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

The effort invested in 'getting it right' should be commensurate with the importance of the decision.

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

Optimistic people play a disproportionate role in shaping our lives. Their decisions make a difference; they are inventors, entrepreneurs, political and military leaders - not average people. They got to where they are by seeking challenges and taking risks.

I used to hold a unitary view, in which I proposed that only experienced happiness matters, and that life satisfaction is a fallible estimate of true happiness.

Economists think about what people ought to do. Psychologists watch what they actually do.

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

Nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it.

Hindsight bias makes surprises vanish.

Mental effort, I would argue, is relatively rare. Most of the time we coast.

Clearly, the decision-making that we rely on in society is fallible. It's highly fallible, and we should know that.

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

If owning stocks is a long-term project for you, following their changes constantly is a very, very bad idea. It's the worst possible thing you can do, because people are so sensitive to short-term losses. If you count your money every day, you'll be miserable.

If people are failing, they look inept. If people are succeeding, they look strong and good and competent. That's the 'halo effect.' Your first impression of a thing sets up your subsequent beliefs. If the company looks inept to you, you may assume everything else they do is inept.

You're surprised by something, but you don't really know what surprised you; you recognize someone, but you don't really know what cues cause you to recognize that person.

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

People like leaders who look like they are dominant, optimistic, friendly to their friends, and quick on the trigger when it comes to enemies. They like boldness and despise the appearance of timidity and protracted doubt.

We are very influenced by completely automatic things that we have no control over, and we don't know we're doing it.

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.

We're generally overconfident in our opinions and our impressions and judgments.

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

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.

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.

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 people evaluate their life, they compare themselves to a standard of what a successful life is, and it turns out that standard tends to be universal: People in Togo and Denmark have the same idea of what a good life is, and a lot of that has to do with money and material prosperity.

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

Poverty is clearly one source of emotional suffering, but there are others, like loneliness. A policy to reduce the loneliness of the elderly would certainly reduce suffering.

We have no reason to expect the quality of intuition to improve with the importance of the problem. Perhaps the contrary: high-stake problems are likely to involve powerful emotions and strong impulses to action.

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.

There's a very good reason for why economics developed the way it did, and that is that in many situations, the assumption that people will exploit the opportunities available to them is very plausible, and it simplifies the analysis of how markets will behave.

We think of our future as anticipated memories.

When you look at the books about well-being, you see one word - it's happiness. People do not distinguish.

It is the consistency of the information that matters for a good story, not its completeness. Indeed, you will often find that knowing little makes it easier to fit everything you know into a coherent pattern.

We think, each of us, that we're much more rational than we are. And we think that we make our decisions because we have good reasons to make them. Even when it's the other way around. We believe in the reasons, because we've already made the decision.

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.

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

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.

Friends are sometimes a big help when they share your feelings. In the context of decisions, the friends who will serve you best are those who understand your feelings but are not overly impressed by them.

We have a very narrow view of what is going on.

Organizations may be better able to tame optimism than individuals are.

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.

Human beings cannot comprehend very large or very small numbers. It would be useful for us to acknowledge that fact.