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

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

Policy makers, like most people, normally feel that they already know all the psychology and all the sociology they are likely to need for their decisions. I don't think they are right, but that's the way it is.

We don’t choose between experiences, we choose between memories of experiences. Even when we think about the future, we don’t think of our future normally as experiences. We think of our future as anticipated memories.

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.

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

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

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.

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.