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.
Throw away my book: you must understand that it represents only one of a thousand attitudes. You must find your own. If someone else could have done something as well as you, don’t do it. If someone else could have said something as well as you, don’t say it—or written something as well as you, don’t write it. Grow fond only of that which you can find nowhere but in yourself, and create out of yourself, impatiently or patiently, ah! that most irreplaceable of beings.
In a controversy, the instant we feel anger, we have already ceased striving for truth and have begun striving for ourselves.
TRUTHFUL, adj. Dumb and illiterate.
The truths that I know best I have learned on my knees. I never know a thing well, till it is burned into my heart by prayer.
In vain I have looked for a single man capable of seeing his own faults and bringing the charge home against himself.
Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know.
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