Explore the most impactful and insightful quotes and sayings by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, and enrich your perspective with the wisdom. Share these inspiring Nassim Nicholas Taleb quotes pictures with your friends on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, completely free. Here are the top 618 Nassim Nicholas Taleb quotes for you to read and share.
it did not so much judge the quality of a trader's performance as encourage him to game the system by working for short-term profits at the expense of possible blowups - like -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
An elephant is vastly more efficient, metabolically, than a mouse. It's the same for a megacity as opposed to a village. But an elephant can break a leg very easily, whereas you can toss a mouse out of a window and it'll be fine. Size makes you fragile. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
A system, artificially stabilized, and of course you have hidden risks under the surface, and you don't know where the risks are. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
I've been telling anyone willing to listen that banks have a tendency to sit on time bombs while convincing themselves that they are conservative and nonvolatile. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
But they never notice the following inconsistency: this so-called worst-case event, when it happened, exceeded the worst case at the time. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
What made medicine fool people for so long was that its successes were prominently displayed and its mistakes (literally) buried. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
I don't go to the doctor except when I'm very ill, and when I go to India, I drink a drop of local water. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Umberto Eco is the owner of a large personal library of almost 30,000 books that he has not read. [To him] read books are far less valuable than unread ones. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Writers are remembered for their best work, politicians for their worst mistakes, and businessmen are almost never remembered. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wear your best for your execution and stand dignified. Your last recourse against randomness is how you act - if you can't control outcomes, you can control the elegance of your behaviour. You will always have the last word. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The difference between slaves in Roman and Ottoman days and today's employees is that slaves did not need to flatter their boss. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
I want to live happily in a world I don't understand. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Pasteur said, like all great discoverers, he knew something about accidental discoveries. The best way to get maximal exposure is to keep researching. Collect opportunities-- -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
higher concentration of dopamine appears to lower skepticism and result in greater vulnerability to pattern detection; an -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
My lesson from Soros is to start every meeting at my boutique by convincing everyone that we are a bunch of idiots who know nothing and are mistake-prone, but happen to be endowed with the rare privilege of knowing it. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Meditation is a way to be narcissistic without hurting anyone -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
If you want to get an idea of a friend's temperament, ethics, and personal elegance, you need to look at him under the tests of severe circumstances, not under the regular rosy glow of daily life. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Never ask anyone for their opinion, forecast, or recommendation. Just ask them what they have - or don't have - in their portfolio. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
If you ever do have to heed a forecast, keep in mind that its accuracy degrades rapidly as you extend it through time. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW. You need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel or a private jet. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Makridakis and Hibon reached the sad conclusion that "statistically sophisticated or complex methods do not necessarily provide more accurate forecasts than simpler ones. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has a simple heuristic. Never ask the doctor what you should do. Ask him what he would do if he were in your place. You would be surprised at the difference -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
I have anecdotal evidence in my business that MBAs tend to blow up in financial markets, as they are trained to simplify matters a couple of steps beyond their requirement. (I beg the MBA reader not to take offense; I am myself the unhappy holder of the degree.) -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
People have the problem of denial. This is one of the things I learned in Lebanon. Everybody who left Beirut when the war started, including my parents, said, 'Oh, its temporary.' It lasted 17 years! People tend to underestimate the gravity of these situations. That's how they work. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Realism is punishing. Probabilistic skepticism is worse. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
People often need to suspend their self-promotion, and have someone in their lives they do not need to impress. This explains dog ownership. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
wealth does not count so much into one's well-being as the route one uses to get to it. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
In finance, for instance, people use flimsy theories to manage their risks and put wild ideas under "rational" scrutiny. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
They think that intelligence is about noticing things are relevant (detecting patterns); in a complex world, intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant (avoiding false patterns) -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Much of modern life is preventable chronic stress injury. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
We have this culture of financialization. People think they need to make money with their savings rather with their own business. So you end up with dentists who are more traders than dentists. A dentist should drill teeth and use whatever he does in the stock market for entertainment. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
What is nonmeasurable and nonpredictable will remain nonmeasurable and nonpredictable ... no matter how much hate mail I get. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
But the worst touristification is the life we moderns have to lead in captivity, during our leisure hours: Friday night opera, scheduled parties, scheduled laughs. Again, golden jail. This "goal-driven" attitude hurts deeply inside my existential self. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Difficulty is what wakes up the genius -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The Internet allows the small guy a global marketplace. But technology is harmful in the sense that we get too much information from it. Because of the web we get 10 times the amount of noise we ever got, which makes harmful fallacies far more likely. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
It is my great hope someday, to see science and decision makers rediscover what the ancients have always known. Namely that our highest currency is respect. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
When you walk the walk, whether successful or not, you feel more indifferent and robust to people's opinion, freer, more real. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Inequalities of wealth lead to a dispersion in wealth for all. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
If you survive until tomorrow, it could mean that either a) you are more likely to be immortal or b) that you are closer to death. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The simpler, the better. Complications lead to multiplicative chains of unanticipated effects. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
I disagree with the followers of Marx and those of Adam Smith: the reason free markets work is because they allow people to be lucky, thanks to aggressive trial and error, not by giving rewards or "incentives" for skill. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Older people are most beautiful when they have what is lacking in the young: poise, erudition, wisdom, phronesis, and this post-heroic absence of agitation. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
follows: to understand the future to the point of being able to predict it, you need to incorporate elements from this future itself. If -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
English does not distinguish between arrogant-up (irreverence toward the temporarily powerful) and arrogant-down (directed at the small guy). -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
I hated school because I liked to daydream and the system tried to stop me from that. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The book is the only medium left that hasn't been corrupted by the profane. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
No matter how sophisticated our choices, how good we are at dominating the odds, randomness will have the last word. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
I then completely gave up reading newspapers and watching television, which freed up a considerable amount of time (say one hour or more a day, enough time to read more than a hundred additional books per year, which, after a couple of decades, starts mounting). -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
But the technology is only trivial retrospectively - not prospectively. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Using, as an excuse, others' failure of common sense is in itself a failure of common sense. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Most people are sceptical about the wrong things and gullible about the wrong things. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
We should reward people, not ridicule them, for thinking the impossible. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The process of discovery (or innovation, or technological progress) itself depends on antifragile tinkering, aggressive risk bearing rather than formal education. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
They will envy you for your success, your wealth, for your intelligence, for your looks, for your status - but rarely for your wisdom. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The rationalist imagines an imbecile-free society; the empiricist and imbecile-proof one, or even better, a rationalist-proof one. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
In other words, history teaches us to avoid the brand of naive empiricism that consists of learning from casual historical facts. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
There were two main sources of technical knowledge and innovation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the hobbyist and the English rector, both of whom were generally in barbell situations. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Missing a train is only painful if you run after it! Likewise, not matching the idea of success others expect from you is only painful if that's what you are seeking. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Love without sacrifice is like theft -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Yet simplicity has been difficult to implement in modern life because it is against the spirit of a certain brand of people who seek sophistication so they can justify their profession. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
...avoidance of small mistakes makes the large ones more severe. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wind extinguishes a candle and energizes fire. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
What I learned on my own I still remember -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Probability is not a mere computation of odds on the dice or more complicated variants; it is the acceptance of the lack of certainty in our knowledge and the development of methods for dealing with our ignorance. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Writing is sacred, other activities are profane, and I don't want them to corrupt my writing. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Greatness starts with the replacement of hatred with polite disdain. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Modernity needs to understand that being rich and becoming rich are not mathematically, personally, socially, and ethically the same thing. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
If you let markets - in general, my belief is that if you let markets give you information, they'll give you the information rather than artificially prop up everything. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Let us return to the idea that universities generate wealth and the growth of useful knowledge in society. There is a causal illusion here; time to bust it. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
You will get the most attention from those who hate you. No friend, no admirer and no partner will flatter you with as much curiosity. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Things always become obvious after the fact -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Life would be unbearably bland if we had no enemies on whom to waste efforts and energy. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Governments are wasting billions of dollars on attempting to predict events that are produced by interdependent systems and are therefore not statistically understandable at the individual level. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
A Stoic is a Buddhist with attitude, one who says "f*** you" to fate. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
system that overcompensates is necessarily in overshooting mode, -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg didn't finish college. Too much emphasis is placed on formal education - I told my children not to worry about their grades but to enjoy learning. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
This is the tragedy of modernity: as with neurotically overprotective parents, those trying to help are often hurting us the most. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
A country's assets reside in the tinkerers, the hobbyists, and the risk-takers. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The problem is that our ideas are sticky: once we produce a theory, we are not likely to change our minds ... -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Two weekends in Philadelphia are not twice as pleasant as a single one - I've tried. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Poverty is clearly one source of emotional suffering, but there are others, like loneliness. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
We humans lack imagination, to the point of not even knowing what tomorrow's important things will look like. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Deficits are like putting dynamite in the hands of children. They can get out of control very quickly. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
We would not even need a statistician; a second-rate engineer would do. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
This is the central illusion in life: that randomness is risky, that it is a bad thing - and that eliminating randomness is done by eliminating randomness. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Just as in matters of seduction, people lend the most to those who need them the least. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Avoidance of boredom is the only worthy mode of action. Life otherwise is not worth living.) -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Scranton showed that we have been building and using jet engines in a completely trial-and-error experiential manner, without anyone truly understanding the theory. Builders -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
We humans are the victims of an asymmetry in the perception of random events. We attribute our successes to our skills, and our failures to external events outside our control, namely to randomness. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Remember that you are a Black Swan. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Abundance is harder for us to handle than scarcity. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
When we want to do something while unconsciously certain to fail, we seek advice so we can blame someone else for the failure. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
We favor the sensational and the extremely visible. This affects the way we judge heroes. There is little room in our consciousness for heroes who do not deliver visible results - or those heroes who focus on process rather than results. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The curious mind embraces science; the gifted and sensitive, the arts; the practical, business; the leftover becomes an economist -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
my antidote to Black Swans is precisely to be noncommoditized in my thinking. But -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
To become a successful philosopher king, it is much better to start as a king than as a philosopher, -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
You exist if and only if you are free to do things without a visible objective, with no justification and, above all, outside the dictatorship of someone else's narrative. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Anything that provides you with very, very stable income, very stable conditions, maybe generally stable, that often, it masks real risks, risks of blow-ups. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Things are always obvious after the fact. The civil servant was a very intelligent person, and this mistake is much more prevalent than one would think. It has to do with the way our mind handles historical information. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
never trust the words of a man who is not free. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
True humility is when you can surprise yourself more than others; the rest is either shyness or good marketing -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The only article Lady Fortuna has no control over is your behavior. Good luck. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Loss of mental function, taste for Frank Sinatra music, and similar degenerative effects. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
You don't become completely free by just avoiding being a slave; you also need to avoid becoming a master. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Debt is a mistake between lender and borrower, and both should suffer. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Only the autodidacts are free. And not just in school matters - those who decommoditize, detouristify their lives. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Those who do not think that employment is systemic slavery are either blind or employed. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
When you beat up someone physically, you get excercise and stress relief; when you assault him verbally on the Internet, you just harm yourself. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The best test of whether someone is extremely stupid (or extremely wise) is whether financial and political news makes sense to him. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The best way to learn a language may be an episode of jail in a foreign country. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
A Stoic is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into transformation, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Never take advice from someone wearing a tie. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
On the day when we are able to foresee inventions we will be living in a state where everything conceivable has been invented. Our -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Psychologists have shown the irony of the process of thought control: the more energy you put into trying to control your ideas and what you think about, the more your ideas end up controlling you. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Karl Marx, a visionary, figured out that you can control a slave much better by convincing him he is an employee. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Make sure that you are in a situation where the constant mistakes are small and can be used for something. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
It might be useful to be able to predict war. But tension does not necessarily lead to war, but often to peace and to denouement. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Probability and expectation are not the same. Its probability and probability times the pay off. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Never ask a trader if he is profitable: you can easily see it in his gesture and gait. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The grandchildren should not bear the debts of the grandparents. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Only in recent history has "working hard" signaled pride rather than shame for lack of talent, finesse and, mostly, sprezzatura . -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
In the past, only some of the males, but all of the females, were able to procreate. Equality is more natural for females. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Evidence shows that we do much less thinking than we believe we do - except, of course, when we think about it. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Every time you use a coffeemaker for your morning cappuccino, you are benefiting from the fragility of the coffeemaking entrepreneur who failed. He failed in order to help put the superior merchandise on your kitchen counter. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Someone who says "I am busy" is either declaring incompetence (and lack of control of his life) or trying to get rid of you. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The traits I respect are erudition and the courage to stand up when half-men are afraid for their reputation. Any idiot can be intelligent. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Most so-called writers keep writing and writing with the hope to, some day, find something to say. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Daily news and sugar confuse our system in the same manner. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The author cites researcher David Howard's idea of post-traumatic growth. Howard contends that some individuals faced with a traumatic event actually develop new strength. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
When some systems are stuck in a dangerous impasse, randomness and only randomness can unlock them and set them free. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Scepticism is effortful and costly. It is better to be sceptical about matters of large consequences, and be imperfect, foolish and human in the small and the aesthetic. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
This simple inability to remember not the true sequence of events but a reconstructed one will make history appear in hindsight to be far more explainable than it actually was - or is. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The epiphany I had in my career in randomness came when I understood that I was not intelligent enough, nor strong enough, to even try to fight my emotions. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
As countries get rich they start increasing education and the very educated people tend to not like trial and error, because they think they're obligated to use the body of knowledge they have. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Some business bets in which one wins big but infrequently, yet loses small but frequently, are worth making if others are suckers for them and if you have the personal and intellectual stamina. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The problem lies in the structure of our minds: we don't learn rules, just facts, and only facts. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Something has worked in the past, until - well, it unexpectedly no longer does, and what we have learned from the past turns out to be at best irrelevant or false, at worst viciously misleading. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
What they call "play" (gym, travel, sports) looks like work. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Don't cross a river if it is four feet deep on average. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
We are quick to forget that just being alive is an extraordinary piece of good luck, a remote event, a chance occurrence of monstrous proportions. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
People do not realize that the media is paid to get your attention. For a journalist, silence rarely surpasses any word. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
You view the world from within a model. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Work hard, not in grunt work, but in chasing such opportunities and maximizing exposure to them. This makes living in big cities invaluable because you increase the odds of serendipitous encounters-you gain exposure to the envelope of serendipity. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The track record of economists in predicting events is monstrously bad. It is beyond simplification; it is like medieval medicine. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The excess energy released from overreaction to setbacks is what innovates! -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
We should probably stop trading derivatives, anything more complex than regular options ... I am an options trader, and I don't understand options. How do you want a regulator to understand them? -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The defender of the dogmas of modern finance and efficient markets started a fund that took advantage of market inefficiencies! It is as if the Pope converted to Islam. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Most info-Web-media-newspaper types have a hard time swallowing the idea that knowledge is reached (mostly) by removing junk from peoples heads -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The next time someone pesters you with unneeded advice, gently remind him of the fate of the monk whom Ivan the Terrible put to death for delivering uninvited (and moralizing) advice. It works as a short-term cure. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Doctors most commonly get mixed up between absence of evidence and evidence of abense -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
If you are an Arabic-speaking, Greek-Orthodox going to a French school it makes you deeply sceptical if you have to listen to three different accounts of the Crusades - one from the Muslim side, one from the Greek side and one from the Catholic side. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
the studious examination of the past in the greatest of detail does not teach you much about the mind of History; it only gives you the illusion of understanding it. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The consequences are not trivial: It means that rational thinking has little, very little, to do with risk avoidance. Much of what rational thinking seems to do is rationalize one's actions by fitting some logic to them. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The people I go after are the false experts, those who do not accept the limits of their knowledge. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Individuals should think about the worst-case scenarios and plan for them. The world will be crazier than you think it will be. Put money away, and then you can live with much more freedom. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
He provides the example of a philosopher who puzzles about the reality of time, but who nonetheless applies for a research grant to work on the philosophical problem of time during next year's sabbatical - without doubting the reality of next year's arrival. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Modernity's double punishment is to make us both age prematurely and live longer. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
A mathematician thinks in numbers, a lawyer in laws, and an idiot thinks in words. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The key to wealth is that it doesn't matter. Once you've had it, you don't think anything of it; you can wear cheap watches. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Globalization has created this interlocking fragility. At no time in the history of the universe has the cancellation of a Christmas order in New York meant layoffs in China. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
(J)ust as we tend to underestimate the role of luck in life in general, we tend to overestimate it in games of chance. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Decomposition, for most, starts when they leave the free, social, and uncorrupted college life for the solitary confinement of professions and nuclear families. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
You find peace by coming to terms with what you don't know. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Half of life - the interesting half of life - we don't have a name for. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
A prophet is not someone with special visions, just someone blind to most of what others see -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
People who forecast simply because "that's my job," knowing pretty well that their forecast is ineffectual, are not what I would call ethical. What they do is no different from repeating lies simply because "it's my job." -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
It certainly takes bravery to remain skeptical; it takes inordinate courage to introspect, to confront oneself, to accept one's limitations
Scientists are seeing more and more evidence that we are specifically designed by mother nature to fool ourselves. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
In politics we face the choice between warmongering, nation-state loving, big-business agents on one hand; and risk-blind, top-down, epistemic arrogant big servants of large employers on the other. But we have a choice. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
It takes extraordinary wisdom and self-control to accept that many things have a logic we do not understand that is smarter than our own. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
People work out, they stress their body, and their body gets stronger from stress. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Mental clarity is the child of courage, not the other way around. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
People feel deep anxiety finding out that someone they thought was stupid is actually more intelligent than they are. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Is the most antifragile place on the planet; it benefits from shocks that take place in the rest of the world. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Light control works; close control leads to overreaction, sometimes causing the machinery to break into pieces. In a famous paper "On Governors," published in 1867, Maxwell modeled the behavior and showed mathematically that tightly controlling the speed of engines leads to instability. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
I believe that forcing researchers to eat their own cooking whenever possible solves a serious problem in science. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
One general, Fabius Maximus was nicknamed Cunctator, "the Procrastinator." He drove Hannibal, who had an obvious military superiority, crazy by avoiding and delaying engagement. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
It is remarkable how fast and how effectively you can construct a nationality with a flag , a few speeches, and a national anthem; to this day I avoid the label "Lebanese," preferring the less restrictive "Levantine" designation. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
What kills me makes others stronger, -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
We scorn the abstract; we scorn it with passion. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
It is as if the mission of modernity was to squeeze every drop of variability and randomness out of life - with the ironic result of making the world a lot more unpredictable, as if the goddesses of chance wanted to have the last word. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
I have no large desire to sacrifice much of my personal habits, intellectual pleasures, and personal standards in order to become a billionaire like Warren Buffett, and I certainly do not see point of becoming one if I were to adopt Spartan (even miserly) habits and live in my starter house. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
It does not matter how frequently something succeeds if failure is too costly to bear. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The bonus for bankers fragilizes the system. Someone has the upside at the expense of others. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
An idea does not survive because it is better than the competition, but rather because the person who holds it has survived! Accordingly, -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Avoid losers. If you hear someone use the words 'impossible', 'never', 'too difficult' too often, drop him or her from your social network. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The number of managers with great track records in a given market depends far more on the number of people who started in the investment business (in place of going to dental school), rather than on their ability to produce profits. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
I attended a symposium, an event named after a fifth century (B.C.) Athenian drinking party in which nonnerds talked about love; alas, there was no drinking, and mercifully, nobody talked about love. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Technology is the result of antifragility, exploited by risk-takers in the form of tinkering and trial and error, with nerd-driven design confined to the backstage. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Private equity has absolutely no reason to exist. The private equity holder has all the upside and the banks all the downside. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Keeping one's distance from an ignorant person is equivalent to keeping company with a wise man. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
My experience is that money and transactions purify relations; ideas and abstract matters like "recognition" and "credit" warp them, creating an atmosphere of perpetual rivalry. I grew to find people greedy for credentials nauseating, repulsive, and untrustworthy. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
I will set aside the point that I see no special heroism in accumulating money, particularly if, in addition, the person is foolish enough to not even try to derive any tangible benefit from the wealth (aside from the pleasure of regularly counting the beans). -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Academics are only useful when they try to be useless (say, as in mathematics and philosophy) and dangerous when they try to be useful. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Is often a good career move for an author. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
I select a very small number of things to be sceptical about, such as markets, and on these I am hypersceptic. But I want to be fooled by randomness in art. I want the ceremonial of religion; we are made for it. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Anything organic requires some dose of variability so it can adapt all the time, and fixing things is not a good idea. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
For the robust, an error is information. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
One cannot judge a performance in any given field (war, politics, medicine, investments) by the results, but by the costs of the alternative (i.e., if history played out in a different way). -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
You have family-owned businesses that have been around for 500 years. You cannot name a corporation that survives intact for even a few decades. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The worst problem of modernity lies in the malignant transfer of fragility and antifragility from one party to the other, with one getting the benefits, the other (unwittingly) getting the harm, with such transfer facilitated by the growing wedge between the ethical and the legal. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
In poor countries, officials receive explicit bribes; in D.C. they get the sophisticated, implicit, unspoken promise to work for large corporations -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Simplicity is not so simple to attain. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
A washing machine needs constant maintenance. It doesn't want any harm. It wants tranquility, and you need someone to - you're not going to harm it by continuously monitoring it and adjusting it. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The classical man's worst fear was inglorious death; the modern man's worst fear is just death -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
If you hear a "prominent" economist using the word 'equilibrium,' or 'normal distribution,' do not argue with him; just ignore him, or try to put a rat down his shirt. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Believe me, it is tough to deal with the social consequences of the appearance of continuous failure. We are social animals; hell is other people. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Being an entrepreneur is an existential, not just a financial thing. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market alow you to put there. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Large corporations and governments do not seem to understand this rebound power of information and its ability to control those who try to control it. When you hear a corporation or a debt-laden government trying to "reinstill confidence" you know they are fragile, hence doomed. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Regular minds find similarities in stories (and situations); finer minds detect differences. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love; close enough on the surface but, to the nonsucker, not exactly the same thing -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Don't aim to be perfect! Aim to be antifragile -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
It is generally accepted that harm from doctors - not including risks from hospital germs - accounts for more deaths than any single cancer. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Alan Greenspan is unskilled; you don't take the unskilled seriously. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Heroes are heroes because they are heroic in behavior, not because they won or lost. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Only he who is free with his time is free with his opinion. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The French writer Edmond About, who visited Greece in 1832, a dozen years after its independence, reports how peasants struggled with the metric system as it was completely unnatural to them and stuck to Ottoman standards instead. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
When things go our way we reject the lack of certainty. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
There is something in nature you don't understand, odds are it makes sense in a deeper way that is beyond your understanding. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
I don't read the papers; I stopped reading the papers. I read the papers only during periods of crisis, and I think papers are too long on a regular day and too short days when we have a crisis. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
I no longer care about the financial system. I gave them my roadmap. OK? Thanks, bye. I've no idea what's going on. I'm disconnected. I'm totally disengaged. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Never ask a man if he is from Sparta: If he were, he would have let you know such an important fact - and if he were not, you could hurt his feelings. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
I had time to kill at the airport and it was a great opportunity for me to buy dark European chocolate, especially since I have managed to successfully convince myself that airport calories don't count. The -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
had no name for the color blue but managed rather well without it - we stayed for a long part of our history culturally, not biologically, color blind. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The opposite of manliness isn't cowardice; it's technology. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The best way to measure the loss of intellectual sophistication - this "nerdification," to put it bluntly - is in the growing disappearance of sarcasm, as mechanic minds take insults a bit too literally. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The four most influential moderns: Darwin, Marx, Freud, and (the productive) Einstein were scholars but not academics. It has always been hard to do genuine - and no perishable - work within institutions -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Life is a tightrope between two errors: generalizing the wrong particular and particularizing the wrong general. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
You want to be yourself, idiosyncratic; the collective (school, rules, jobs, technology) wants you generic to the point of castration. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Redundancy is ambiguous because it seems like a waste if nothing unusual happens. Except that something unusual happens-usually . -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Political life loves some volatility. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The worst side effect of wealth is the social associations it forces on its victims, as people with big houses end up socializing with other people with big houses. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The central idea in The Black Swan is that: rare events cannot be estimated from empirical observation since they are rare. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
People are much less interested in what you are trying to show them than what you are trying to hide. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Some people are only funny when they try to be serious. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Don't understand? is, simply, work on the undesirable states of f(x). It is often easier to modify f(x) than to get better knowledge of x. (In other words, robustification rather than forecasting Black Swans.) Example: If I buy an insurance on -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
An ad hominen attack against an intellectual, not against an idea, is highly flattering. It indicates that the person does not have anything intelligent to say about your message. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
If my brain can tell the difference between noise and signal, my heart cannot. Such -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
I have always hated employment and the associated dependence on someone else's arbitrary opinion, particularly when much of what's done inside large corporations violates my sense of ethics. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Curiosity is antifragile, like an addiction, and is magnified by attempts to satisfy it - books have a secret mission and ability to multiply, as everyone who has wall-to-wall bookshelves knows well. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Not seeing a tsunami or an economic event coming is excusable; building something fragile to them is not. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
It was calculated that actors who win an Oscar tend to live on average about five years longer than their peers who don't. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
People employed in financial institutions are rarely interesting and even more rarely likable. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The Nation-state: apartheid without political incorrectness. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Only the autodidacts are free. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
It is much harder to become independent if you are wealthy than to become wealthy if you are independent. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
If the student is smart, the teacher takes the credit. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Education makes the wise slightly wiser, but it makes the fool vastly more dangerous. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
What America does best is produce the ability to accept failure. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
We are faulty and there is no need to bother trying to correct our flaws. We are so defective and so mismatched to our environment that we can just work around these flaws. I -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
between one-third and one-half of all marriages fail, -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
An idea starts to be interesting when you get scared of taking it to its logical conclusion. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Authors, artists, and even philosophers are much better off having a very small number of fanatics behind them than a large number of people who appreciate their work. The number of persons who dislike the work don't count - there is no such thing as the opposite of buying your book, -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Our brain is not cut out for nonlinearities. People think that if, say, two variables are causally linked, then a steady input in one variable should always yield a result in the other one. Our emotional apparatus is designed for linear causality. For -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Answer e-mails from junior people before more senior ones. Junior people have further to go and tend to remember who slighted them. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
A turkey is fed for a thousand days by a butcher; every day confirms to its staff of analysts that butchers love turkeys "with increased statistical confidence. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius (one of the doer-Stoic authors), "fire feeds on obstacles. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The Procrustean bed in life consists precisely in simplifying the non-linear and making it linear - the simplification that distorts. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
If my brain can ttell the difference between noise and signal, my heart cannot. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
One single observation can invalidate a general statement derived from millennia of confirmatory sightings of millions of white swans. All you need is one single (and, I am told, quite ugly) black bird.* -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
We attribute our successes to our skills, and our failures to external events outside our control, namely to randomness. We -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Dress your best on your execution day. Be extremely courteous to your assistant when you lose money. Try not to blame others for your fate, even if they deserve blame. Never exhibit any self-pity. Do not complain. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Being an economist is the least ethical profession, closer to charlatanism than any science. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
But the larger point is that we can now see that depriving systems of stressors, vital stressors, is not necessarily a good thing, and can be downright harmful. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
What Erasmus called ingratitudo vulgi, the ingratitude of the masses, is increasing in the age of globalization and the Internet. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
All of technology, really, is about maximizing free options. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Prediction, not narration, is the real test of our understanding of the world. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Don't disturb complicated systems that have been around for a very long time. We don't understand their logic. Don't pollute the planet. Leave it the way we found it, regardless of scientific 'evidence'. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Go to parties. You can't even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
We know from chaos theory that even if you had a perfect model of the world, you'd need infinite precision in order to predict future events. With sociopolitical or economic phenomena, we don't have anything like that. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Patients who spend fifteen minutes every day writing an account of their daily troubles feel indeed better about what has befallen them. You -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
There is one world in which I believe the habit of mistaking luck for skill is most prevalent - and most conspicuous - and that is the world of markets. By -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Huet presents arguments against causality that are quite potent - he states, for instance, that any event can have an infinity of possible causes. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Black Swans and tail events run the socioeconomic world -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
People used to wear ordinary clothes weekdays, and formal attire on Sunday. Today it is the exact reverse. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
We tend to treat our knowledge as personal property to be protected and defended. It is an ornament that allows us to rise in the pecking order ... we take what we know a little too seriously. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
If I could predict what my day would exactly look like, I would feel a little bit dead. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
What organized dating sites fail to understand is that the people are far more interesting in what they don't say about themselves. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Stoicism is about the *domestication* of emotions, not their elimination. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
There is a saying that bad traders divorce their spouse sooner than abandon their positions. Loyalty to ideas is not a good thing for traders, scientists - or anyone. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
I figured out that whatever I selected myself I could read with more depth and more breadth - there was a match to my curiosity. And I could take advantage of what people later pathologized as Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD) by using natural stimulation as a main driver to scholarship. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
By all means, avoid words - threats, complaints, justification, narratives, reframing, attempts to win arguments, supplications; avoid words! -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Every social association that is not face-to-face is injurious to your health -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
So the modern world may be increasing in technological knowledge, but, paradoxically, it is making things a lot more unpredictable. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
If my detractors knew me better they would hate me even more. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Democracies can't handle austerity measures very well. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
There is a certain category of fool-the overeducated, the academic, the journalist, the newspaper reader, the mechanistic scientist, the pseudo-empiricist, those endowed with what I call epistemic arrogance, this wonderful ability to discount what they did not see, the unobserved. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
More data - such as paying attention to the eye colors of the people around when crossing the street - can make you miss the big truck. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
From such examples, I derived the rule that what is called "healthy" is generally unhealthy, just as "social" networks are antisocial, and the "knowledge"-based economy is typically ignorant. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
But simplicity is not so simple to attain. Steve Jobs figured out that "you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple." The Arabs have an expression for trenchant prose: no skill to understand it, mastery to write it. Heuristics -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
I lift heavy weights and sprint, but I am so bad at it that I develop severe injuries. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Maximize the serendipity around you. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Bailing out every bank that fails makes the system riskier, not safer. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
We glorify those who left their names in history books at the expense of those contributors about whom our books are silent. We humans are not just a superficial race - we are a very unfair one. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Why do we keep focusing on the minutiae, not the possible significant large events, in spite of the obvious evidence of their huge influence? -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
With few exceptions, those who dress outrageously are robust or even antifragile in reputation; those clean-shaven types who dress in suits and ties are fragile to information about them. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
By setting oneself totally free of constraints, free of thoughts, free of this debilitating activity called work, free of efforts, elements hidden in the texture of reality start staring at you; then mysteries that you never thought existed emerge in front of your eyes. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
With a Latin saying that sophistication is born out of hunger (artificia docuit fames). -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Scientists may be in the business of laughing at their predecessors, but owing to an array of human mental dispositions, few realize that someone will laugh at their beliefs in the (disappointingly near) future. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Men destroy each other during war, themselves during peacetime. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Paul Krugman is a danger to society! -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Economics make homeopath and alternative healers look empirical and scientific. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
I am happy everywhere except in places where I see glitz and rich farts. I am happiest in Brooklyn, where the concentration of rich farts is minimal. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The imagination of the genius vastly surpasses his intellect; the intellect of the academic vastly surpasses his imagination -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
When I trade, I don't have an agency problem; I have my neck on the line. When a bank or banker trades, it's not his neck on the line. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
from increasing the number of people in the "tails," that small, very small number of risk takers crazy enough to have ideas of their own, those endowed with -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The problem of knowledge is that there are many more books on birds written by ornithologists than books on birds written by birds and books on ornithologists written by birds -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
It was obvious that their profits were simply cash borrowed from destiny with some random payback time. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Half of the people lie with their lips; the other half with their tears -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
what is made to fly will not do well trapped on the ground, -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
A life saved is a statistic; a person hurt is an anecdote. Statistics are invisible; anecdotes are salient. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
For the antifragile, shocks bring more benefits (equivalently, less harm) as their intensity increases (up to a point). -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Janet Yellen at the FED is equivalent to having a biology schoolteacher who has never seen blood perform brain surgery. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The mortgage crisis is a clear instance of consumers who needed protection. There was predatory lending to people who didn't know what they were doing. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The characteristic feature of the loser is to bemoan, in general terms, mankind's flaws, biases, contradictions, and irrationality - without exploiting them for fun and profit -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Bitcoin is the beginning of something great: a currency without a government, something necessary and imperative. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
We are victims of the post-Enlightenment view that the world functions like a sophisticated machine, to be understood like a textbook engineering problem and run by wonks. In other words, like a home appliance, not like the human body. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Philosophers talk about truth and falsehood. People in life talk about payoff, exposure, and consequences (risks and rewards), hence fragility and antifragility. And sometimes philosophers and thinkers and those who study conflate Truth with risks and rewards. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
I suppose that the main benefit of being rich (over just being independent) is to be able to despise rich people (a good concentration of whom you find in glitzy ski resorts) without any sour grapes. It is even sweeter when these farts don't know that you are richer than they are. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Michelangelo was asked by the pope about the secret of his genius, particularly how he carved the statue of David, largely considered the masterpiece of all masterpieces. His answer was: "It's simple. I just remove everything that is not David. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Success is about honour, feeling morally calibrated, absence of shame, not what some newspaper defines from an external metric. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The fastest way to become rich is to socialize with the poor; the fastest way to become poor is to socialize with the rich. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
History is opaque. You see what comes out, not the script that produces events, [ ... ] The generator of historical events is different from the events themselves, much as the minds of the gods cannot be read just by witnessing their deeds. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Interventionism depletes mental and economic resources; it is rarely available when it is needed the most. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Nietzsche had the Latin pun aut liberi, aut libri - either children or books, both information that carries through the centuries. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Forecasting by bureaucrats tends to be used for anxiety relief rather than for adequate policy making. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
It is just that narrative can be lethal when used in the wrong places. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
There are two types of people: those who try to win and those who try to win arguments. They are never the same. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Complex systems are full of interdependencies - hard to detect - and nonlinear responses. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
In short, the fragilista (medical, economic, social planning) is one who makes you engage in policies and actions, all artificial, in which the benefits are small and visible, and the side effects potentially severe and invisible. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
In the long run everything with the most minute vulnerability breaks, given the ruthlessness of time. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
In social policy, when we provide a safety net, it should be designed to help people take more entrepreneurial risks, not to turn them into dependents. This doesn't mean that we should be callous to the underprivileged. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Those who were unlucky in life in spite of their skills would eventually rise. The lucky fool might have benefited from some luck in life; over the longer run he would slowly converge to the state of a less-lucky idiot. Each one would revert to his long-term properties. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The reference point argument is as follows: do not compute odds from the vantage point of the winning gambler (or the lucky Casanova, or the endlessly bouncing back New York City, or the invincible Carthage), but from all those who started in the cohort. Consider -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
You have a real life if and only if you do not compete with anyone in any of your pursuits. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
If one puts an infinite number of monkeys in front of typewriters, and lets them clap away, there is a certainty that one of them will come out with an exact version of the 'Iliad.' -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Now for reasons that have to do with the increase of the artificial, the move away from ancestral and natural models, and the loss in robustness owing to complications in the design of everything, the role of Black Swans in increasing. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
It is a very recent disease to mistake the unobserved for the nonexistent; but some are plagued with the worse disease of mistaking the unobserved for the unobservable. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
So knowledge grows by subtraction much more than by addition - given that what we know today might turn out to be wrong but what we know to be wrong cannot turn out to be right, at least not easily. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Simply, humans should not be given explosive toys (like atomic bombs, financial derivatives, or tools to create life). -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
I can find confirmation for just about anything, the -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
I suspect that they put Socrates to death because there is something terribly unattractive, alienating, and nonhuman in thinking with too much clarity. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
There are systems that use failure as fuel for improvement, where the cost of failure is small. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
When an investor focuses on short-term investments, he or she is observing the variability of the portfolio, not the returns - in short, being fooled by randomness. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
If you don't feel that you haven't read enough, you haven't read enough. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Never think that lack of variability is stability. Don't confuse lack of volatility with stability, ever. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
It's not a good idea to take a forecast from someone wearing a tie. If possible, tease people who take themselves and their knowledge too seriously. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sometimes people ask you a question with their eyes begging you to not tell them the truth. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Most humans manage to squander their free time, as free time makes them dysfunctional, lazy, and unmotivated - the busier they get, the more active they are at other tasks. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Seneca's version of that Stoicism is antifragility from fate. No downside from Lady Fortuna, plenty of upside. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Charm is the ability to insult people without offending them; nerdiness the reverse -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
We can control a function of x, f(x), even if x remains vastly beyond our understanding. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
At no point in history have so many non-risk-takers, that is, those with no personal exposure, exerted so much control. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Comfort makes you weaker. We need some variability, some stressors. Not too much, but just enough. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Restaurants get you in with food to sell you liquor; religions get you in with belief to sell you rules. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
For if you think that education causes wealth, rather than being a result of wealth, or that intelligent actions and discoveries are the result of intelligent ideas, you will be in for a surprise. Let us see what kind of surprise. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
An erudite is someone who displays less than he knows; a journalist or consultant the opposite. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Ideas come and go, stories stay. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
A central argument is never a summary. It is more like a generator. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
My best definition of a nerd: someone who asks you to explain an aphorism -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
For the fragile, the cumulative effect of small shocks is smaller than the single effect of an equivalent single large shock. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Cumulative errors depend largely on the big surprises, the big opportunities. Not only do economic, financial, and political predictors miss them, but they are quite ashamed to say anything outlandish to their clients and yet events, it turns out, are almost always outlandish. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
But it remains the case that you know what is wrong with a lot more confidence than you know what is right. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
So let us call here the teleological fallacy the illusion that you know exactly where you are going, and that you knew exactly where you were going in the past, and that others have succeeded in the past by knowing where they were going. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Information is bad for knowledge. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
We said that mere judgment would probably suffice in a primitive society. It is easy for a society to live without mathematics - -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Work destroys your soul by stealthily invading your brain during the hours not officially spent working; be selective about professions. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Learn to fail with pride - and do so fast and cleanly. Maximise trial and error - by mastering the error part. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The next time you experience a blackout, take some solace by looking at the sky. You will not recognize it. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
If you take risks and face your fate with dignity, there is nothing you can do that makes you small; if you don't take risks, there is nothing you can do that makes you grand, nothing. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The government-sponsored institution Fannie Mae, when I look at its risks, seems to be sitting on a barrel of dynamite, vulnerable to the slightest hiccup. But not to worry: their large staff of scientists deemed these events "unlikely." -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
do not use this argument to avoid trying to learn from history. All I am saying is that it is not so simple; be suspicious of the "because" and handle it with care - particularly in situations where you suspect silent evidence. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
If you need to listen to music while walking, don't walk; and please don't listen to music. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
At the end, what matters is the strength of the string - not the wealth and power of the dining party. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The fool generalizes the particular; the nerd particularizes the general; some do both; and the wise does neither -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Mild success can be explainable by skills and labor. Wild success is attributable to variance. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
It is said that the best horses lose when they compete with slower ones and win against better rivals. Undercompensation from the absence of a stressor,inverse hormesis, absence of challenge, degrades the best of the best. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Also, it's good to have more than one profession, in case your own profession goes out of style. A Wall Street trader who's also a belly dancer will do a lot better than a trader who winds up driving a taxi. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The only condition for such brand of more sophisticated rationalism: to believe and act as if one does not have the full story - to be sophisticated you need to accept that you are not so. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
People focus on role models; it is more effective to find antimodels - people you don't want to resemble when you grow up -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The inability to predict outliers implies the inability to predict the course of history -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
We build toys. Some of those toys change the world. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
You may never know what type of person someone is unless they are given opportunities to violate moral or ethical codes. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Never take advice from anyone in a tie. They'll bankrupt you. Don't ask a general for advice on war, and don't ask a broker for advice on money. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Aesthetics, ethics, and many good things in humans are contagious. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Modernity has replaced ethics with legalese, and the law can be gamed with a good lawyer. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
We laugh at others and we don't realize that someone will be just as justified in laughing at us on some not too remote day -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Procrastination is the soul rebelling against entrapment. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
My biggest problem with modernity may lie in the growing separation of the ethical and the legal -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
(I've had a hard time conveying to intellectuals the intellectual superiority of practice.) -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
to avoid dullness may help to filter out the nonessential.) -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Much of the research into humans' risk-avoidance machinery shows that it is antiquated and unfit for the modern world; it is made to counter repeatable attacks and learn from specifics. If someone narrowly escapes being eaten by a tiger in a certain cave, then he learns to avoid that cave. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
major ramification of the ludic fallacy: how those whose job it is to make us aware of uncertainty fail us and divert us into bogus certainties through the back door. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
I don't know anyone on Wall Street who goes to work every day thinking of anything but how to increase their bonus. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The American people will eventually get hurt by this accumulated deficit. That's the problem. We have too much deficit. We have to find a solution. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
You can tell how poor someone feels by the number of times he references "money" in his conversation. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The difference between technology and slavery is that slaves are fully aware that they are not free -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The appearance of busyness reinforces the perception of causality, of the link between results, and one's role in them. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Normative Economics is like religion without the aesthetics. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
We do not realize the full extent of the difference between near and far futures. Yet -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The more you summarize, the more order you put in, the less randomness. Hence the same condition that makes us simplify pushes us to think that the world is less random than it actually is. And -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Stoicism's Emotional Robustification Success brings an asymmetry: you now have a lot more to lose than to gain. You are hence fragile. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
I will repeat the following until I am hoarse: it is contagion that determines the fate of a theory in social science, not its validity. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Any system that is deprived of its natural volatility, with government up (unintelligible) volatile, any system becomes very fragile. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
This is hard to accept in the age of the Internet. It has been very hard for me to explain that the more data you get, the less you know what's going on, and the more iatrogenics you will cause. People are still under the illusion that "science" means more data. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
I always remind myself that what one observes is at best a combination of variance and returns, not just returns. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
cocksure prophet. Where I beg to differ with the great -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Banks have never made money in the history of banking, losing the equivalent of all their past profits periodically - while bankers strike it rich. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
You know you have influence when people start noticing your absence more than the presence of others. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
central problem is that birds rarely write more than ornithologists - Combining -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Information is antifragile; it feeds more on attempts to harm it than it does on efforts to promote it. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Suckers try to win arguments, nonsuckers try to win. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Suckers think that you cure greed with money, addiction with substances, expert problems with experts, banking with bankers, economics with economists, and debt crises with debt spending -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
I'm in favour of religion as a tamer of arrogance. For a Greek Orthodox, the idea of God as creator outside the human is not God in God's terms. My God isn't the God of George Bush. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
It is a sign of weakness to avoid showing signs of weakness. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Too much success is the enemy, too much failure is demoralizing. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Be. So I follow the Lindy effect as a guide in selecting what to read: books that have been around for ten years will be around for ten more; books that have been around for two millennia should be around for quite a bit of time, and so forth. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
That if you need something urgently done, give the task to the busiest (or second busiest) person in the office. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
For the classics philosophical insight was the product of a life of leisure; for me a life of leisure is the product of philosophical insight. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
If you roll dice, you know that the odds are one in six that the dice will come up on a particular side. So you can calculate the risk. But, in the stock market, such computations are bull - you don't even know how many sides the dice have! -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
We can also see from the turkey story the mother of all harmful mistakes: mistaking absence of evidence (of harm) for evidence of absence, -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
I'd rather have the market tell us what - I'd rather have events precipitate events, rather than just sit there like passive people in Washington. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Probability is not about the odds, but about the belief in the existence of an alternative outcome, cause, or motive. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Those who talk about books as commodities are inauthentic, just as those who collect acquaintances can be superficial in their friendships. A novel you like resembles a friend. You read it and reread it, getting to know it better. Like a friend, you accept it the way it is; you do not judge it. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
for decades doctors never suspected that this "useless" tissue might actually have a use that escaped their detection. The -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
You need a story to displace a story. Metaphors and stories are far more potent (alas) than ideas; they are also easier to remember and more fun to read. If I have to go after what I call the narrative disciplines, my best tool is a narrative.
Ideas come and go, stories stay. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
It is often the mistakes of others that benefit the rest of us and, sadly, not them ... For the antifragile, harm from errors should be less than the benefits. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The payoff of a human venture is, in general, inversely proportional to what it is expected to be. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Breaking a fast feels like the exact opposite of a hangover. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
A man is honorable in proportion to the personal risks he takes for his opinion - in other words, the amount of downside he is exposed to. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
You know, children philosophize more than adults - and they are critical of adults. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
What we do today has nothing to do with capitalism or socialism. It is a crony type of system that transfers money to the coffers of bureaucrats. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Weak men act to satisfy their needs, stronger men their duties. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
This idea that in order to make a decision you need to focus on the consequences (which you can know) rather than the probability (which you can't know) is the central idea of uncertainty. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
that very rare ability called imagination, that rarer quality called courage, and who make things happen. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The only valid political system is one that can handle an imbecile in power without suffering from it -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
I know that history is going to be dominated by an improbable event, I just don't know what that event will be. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Don't read newspapers for the news (just for the gossip and, of course, profiles of authors). The best filter to know if the news matters is if you hear it in cafes, restaurants ... or (again) parties. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
This nationality business helps you make a great story and satisfies your hunger for ascription of causes. It seems to be the dump site where all explanations go until one can ferret out a more obvious one (such as, say, some evolutionary argument that "makes sense"). Indeed, -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The Black Swan asymmetry allows you to be confident about what is wrong, not about what you believe is right. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
There is asymmetry. Those who die do so very early in the game, while those who live go on living very long. Whenever there is asymmetry in outcomes, the average survival has nothing to do with the median survival. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
And we can almost always detect antifragility (and fragility) using a simple test of asymmetry: anything that has more upside than downside from random events (or certain shocks) is antifragile; the reverse is fragile. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Dignity is worth nothing unless you earn it, unless you are willing to pay a price for it. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Seneca and stoicism as a back door to explain why everything antifragile has to have more upside than downside -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Nature builds things that are antifragile. In the case of evolution, nature uses disorder to grow stronger. Occasional starvation or going to the gym also makes you stronger, because you subject your body to stressors and gain from them. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
My nightmare scenario is that the government saves Citibank once again, as well as the other banks, and business resumes as usual. Then, the next time the system breaks, it breaks much, much bigger. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Assume that you live in a town with two hospitals - one large, the other small. On a given day 60 percent of those born in one of the two hospitals are boys. Which hospital is it likely to be? -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
In the United States, large corporations control some members of Congress. All this does is delay the corporation's funeral at our expense. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
You want failures to be small and informational. Silicon Valley does very well. It knows how to use failure as a tool for improvement. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The problem with experts is that they do not know what they do not know -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The twentieth century was the bankruptcy of the social utopia; the twenty-first will be that of the technological one. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Fragility is the quality of things that are vulnerable to volatility. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The best horses lose when they compete with slower ones, and win against better rivals. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
In general, positive Black Swans take time to show their effect while negative ones happen very quickly - it is much easier and much faster to destroy than to build. (During -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
In economic life and history more generally, just about everything of consequence comes from black swans; ordinary events have paltry effects in the long term. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Rationalism crashes in the tails. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Mathematics is principally a tool to meditate, rather than to compute. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
You can tell how uninteresting a person is by asking him whom he finds interesting. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Governments that try to shoot for a surplus hardly ever reach it. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Innovation and sophistication spark from initial situations of necessity, in ways that go far beyond the satisfaction of such necessity -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
A prophet is not someone who first had an idea. He is the one to first believe in it and take it to its conclusion. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
awareness of a problem does not mean much - particularly when you have special interests and self-serving institutions in play. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The tragedy of virtue is that the more obvious, boring, unoriginal, and sermonizing the proverb, the harder it is to implement. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
You can afford to be compassionate, lax, and courteous if, once in a while, when it is least expected of you, but completely justified, you sue someone, or savage an enemy, just to show that you can walk the walk. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
There is a Yiddish saying: If I am going to be forced to eat pork, it better be of the best kind. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Black Swan Is Relative to Knowledge -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Modernity widened the distance between the sensational and the relevant. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
By creating bureaucracies, we put civil servants in a position to make decisions based on abstract and theoretical matters, with the illusion that they will be making them in a rational, accountable way. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
This lack of translation is a mental handicap that comes with being a human; and we will only start to attain wisdom or rationality when we make an effort to overcome and break through it. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
I want them poor and they deserve to be poor. You can't have capitalism without punishment. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Categorizing is necessary for humans, but it becomes pathological when the category is seen as definitive, preventing people from considering the fuzziness of boundaries, -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Randomness works well in search sometimes better than humans. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
He tends to mistake the unknown for the nonexistent. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
A mathematician starts with a problem and creates a solution; a consultant starts by offering a "solution" and creates a problem. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The implication is that we feel emotions (limbic brain) then find an explanation (neocortex). As -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Another definition of modernity: conversations can be more and more completely reconstructed with clips from other conversations taking place at the same time on the planet. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
You are rich if money you refuse tastes better than money you accept. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
We learn the most from fools ... yet we pay them back with the worst ingratitude. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Bankers, they're not harmed by their mistakes. They benefit when things go right, and the society pays the price. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
We are not made to view things as independent from each other. When viewing two events A and B, it is hard not to assume that A causes B, B causes A, or both cause each other. Our bias is immediately to establish a causal link. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Is the economy something organic or is it something engineered? I think it's closer to the organic. You harm it by artificially suppressing volatility in it. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Just as no monkey is as good-looking as the ugliest of humans, no academic is worthier than the worst of the creators -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
To become a philosopher, start by walking very slowly. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Modernity: we created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
To understand how something works, figure out how to break it. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Capitalism is about adventurers who get harmed by their mistakes, not people who harm others with their mistakes. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Nation-states like war; city-states like commerce; families like stability; and individuals like entertainment, -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
We didn't get where we are thanks to the sissy notion of resilience. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
[T]he worst thing one can do to feel one knows things a bit deeper is to try to go into them a bit deeper. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
If you're going to fail, you'd rather fail early than fail late in general. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Your reputation is harmed the most by what you say to defend it. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Asking science to explain life and vital matters is equivalent to asking a grammarian to explain poetry. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
We can, however, assess regularities by running precise and thorough experiments on how people react under certain conditions, and keep a tally of what we see. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
My major hobby is teasing people who take themselves and the quality of their knowledge too seriously and those who don't have the guts to sometimes say: I don't know ... -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
There are secrets to our world that only practice can reveal, and no opinion or analysis will ever capture in full. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Much of aging comes from a misunderstanding of the effect of comfort. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
It seems that it is the most unsuccessful people who give the most advice, particularly for writing and financial matters. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
For many people, commuting is the worst part of the day, and policies that can make commuting shorter and more convenient would be a straightforward way to reduce minor but widespread suffering. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
A man without a heroic bent starts dying at the age of thirty. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Pure generosity is when you help the ingrate. Every other form is self-serving. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Character is proportionate to N, the number of consecutive failures without being discouraged, or equivalently, the number of successive rejections without being intimidated. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Banking is a very treacherous business because you don't realize it is risky until it is too late. It is like calm waters that deliver huge storms. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
We should ban banks from risk-taking because society is going to pay the price. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic." Statistics stay silent in us. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
We have far too many ways to interpret past events for our own good. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The more data we have, the more likely we are to drown in it. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
One useful trick, I discovered, is to avoid listening to the question of the interviewer, and answer with whatever I have been thinking about recently. Remarkably, neither the interviewers nor the public notices the absence of correlation between question and answer. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
A verbal threat is the most authentic certificate of impotence. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Memory is more of a self-serving dynamic revision machine: you remember the last time you remembered the event, and without realizing it, change the story at every subsequent remembrance. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
A good book gets better at the second reading. A great book at the third. Any book not worth rereading isn't worth reading. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The occurrence of a highly improbable event is the equivalent of the nonoccurrence of a highly probable one -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The model was right, it worked well, but the game turned out to be a different one than anticipated. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
It is far easier to figure out if something is fragile than to predict the occurrence of an event that may harm it. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
A good maxim allows you to have the last word without even starting a conversation. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
If you want to annoy a poet, explain his poetry. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Experience is devoid of the cherry-picking that we find in studies. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
...we are too brainwashed by notions of causality and we think that it is smarter to say because than to accept randomness. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The world in which we live has an increasing number of feedback loops, causing events to be the cause of more events (say, people buy a book because other people bought it), thus generating snowballs and arbitrary and unpredictable planet-wide winner-take-all effects. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Never, never, never think - that's one lesson you should have in life. Never think that lack of variability is stability. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
When you ask people, 'What's the opposite of fragile?,' they tend to say robust, resilient, adaptable, solid, strong. That's not it. The opposite of fragile is something that gains from disorder. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
What fools call "wasting time" is most often the best investment. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
We can get closer to the truth by negative instances, not by verification! It -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
your happiness depends far more on the number of instances of positive feelings, what psychologists call "positive affect," than on their intensity when they hit. In -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
I'm a private intellectual, not a public one. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Mental effort moves us into higher gear, activating more vigorous and more analytical brain machinery. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Social science means inventing a certain brand of human we can understand. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Luck is the grand equalizer. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
For Mother Nature, opinions and predictions don't count; surviving is what matters. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
a series of corroborative facts is not necessarily evidence. Seeing -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
So just as Stoicism is the domestication, not the elimination, of emotions, so is the barbell a domestication, not the elimination, of uncertainty. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Success is becoming in middle adulthood what you dreamed to be in late childhood. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
To succeed in life requires a total inability to do anything that makes you uncomfortable when you look at yourself in the mirror. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
You need a story to displace a story. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
You never win an argument until they attack your person. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
I'm a capitalist but one who is smallist and localist, and who favours businesses where owners are still in charge. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
While in theory randomness is an intrinsic property, in practice, randomness is incomplete information. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Hard science gives sensational results with a horribly boring process; philosophy gives boring results with a sensational process; literature gives sensational results with a sensational process; and economics gives boring results with a boring process. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The hidden benefit of antifragility is that you can guess worse than random and still end up outperforming. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
If something is going on, I hear about it. I like to talk to people, I socialise. Television is a waste of time. Human contact is what matters. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
that the Black Swan has three attributes: unpredictability, consequences, and retrospective explainability. Let -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb