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.

Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.

Political columnists and sports pundits are rewarded for being overconfident.

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

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.

People are very good [at] thinking about agents. The mind is set really beautifully to think about agents. Agents have traits. Agents have behaviors. We understand agents. We form global impression of their personalities. We are really not very good at remembering sentences where the subject of the sentence is an abstract notion.

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