Nothing in life is quite as important as you think it is while you're thinking about it.
Interpretation
Our perceptions often exaggerate the importance of things when we are focused on them.
This quote by Daniel Kahneman suggests that the significance we attribute to certain events or thoughts is often inflated during the moment of contemplation. In moments of reflection, we tend to obsess over issues, assigning them a weight that they may not genuinely possess, highlighting the cognitive biases that influence our judgment and decision-making.
In practice
In a motivational speech about managing stress, one might use this quote to encourage the audience to focus on the bigger picture.
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.
The average investor's return is significantly lower than market indices due primarily to market timing.
Banks are run by executives, and executives protect themselves, and that does not always mean that banks are going to behave rationally.
Laziness is built deep into our nature.
Through some combination of culture and biology, our minds are intuitively receptive to religion.
You are more likely to learn something by finding surprises in your own behavior than by hearing surprising facts about people in general.
In the dim background of our mind we know meanwhile what we ought to be doing: getting up, dressing ourselves, answering the person who has spoken to us, trying to make the next step in our reasoning. But somehow we cannot start.
I've always had an unsentimental view. I don't think the BBC is my auntie. I worked there for years, and you learn that they don't love you for yourself. They'll use you as long as you're popular. You shouldn't wait until it starts to wane. It can sometimes end badly.
Without freedom of thought, there can be no such thing as wisdom; and no such thing as public liberty without freedom of speech; which is the right of every man as far as by it he does not hurt or control the right of another; and this is the only check it ought to suffer and the only bounds it ought to know.... Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freedom of speech, a thing terrible to traitors.
The future is inherently full of discontinuities, and lessons of the past must be applied with enormous caution.
It is more difficult to rule yourself than to rule a city.
Anybody who has something sensible or worthwhile to say should be able to say it calmly and soberly, relying on the words themselves to convey his meaning, without resorting to yelling.
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