Daniel Kahneman Quotes

The illusion of self-awareness. Happy automatons, running on trivial programs. I'll bet you never guess. From the inside, how can you?

Most everything you think you know about me is nothing more than memories.

I was constantly watching myself, my secret self, as dependent on my actions as my own personality

We are one of only three species on our planet that can claim to be self-aware, yet self-delusion may be a more significant characteristic of our kind.

And that was it; it was so easy for her. My own memories did not even belong to me. But I knew she was wrong. I had seen that comet. I knew it as well as I knew my own face, my own hands. My own heart.

I'm not always what I think I am, but I am what I think.

I'd take a look at my own self in the mirror and wonder how it was possible that anybody could manage such an enormous thing as being what he was.

Sometimes I think all my pictures are just pictures of me. My concern is...the human predicament; only what I consider the human predicament may simply be my own.

It is wrong to say: I think. One ought to say: I am thought. I is someone else.

Look in the mirror. The face that pins you with its double gaze reveals a chastening secret.

To look at ourselves from afar, to make the subjective suddenly objective: this gives us a psychic shock.

People seem to know more about me than I do.

I always have a hard time describing myself.

To every man in the world there is one person of whom he knows little: whom he would never recognize if he met him walking down the street, whose motives are a mystery to him. That is himself.

I--this thought which is called I--is the mould into which the world is poured like melted wax.

You're who you think you are, even if you never admit it to yourself or to anyone else. You may be in the worst position to judge, but you're in the best position to know.

We are reduced to asking others what we are. We never dare to ask ourselves.

I realize that I'm kind of a different person than I thought I was.

When I look for my existence I do not look for it in myself.

Do you ever suddenly find it strange to be yourself?

I know that I exist; the question is, What is this 'I' that 'I' know.

For however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable I.

And identity is funny being yourself is funny as you are never yourself to yourself except as you remember yourself and then of course you do not believe yourself.

It is human defect — to try to know oneself by the self of another.

I consider my selfbeing ... that taste of myself, of I and me above and in all things, which is more distinctive than the taste of ale or alum, more distinctive than the smell of walnutleaf or camphor, and is incommunicable by any means to another man.