Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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Limit to courage? There is no limit to courage.
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I do not like to repeat successes, I like to go on to other things.
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As a kid, I was always a tomboy, playing sport and doing martial arts. And I'm pretty opinionated - I've never been told that I'm a weak person.
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Some kids go walking in the mountains, but I just went to the cinema. So when I told my parents I wanted to be an actor, even though this wasn't normal for Arab kids or anyone in the town, they were sort of expecting it and were very supportive.
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Experts are able to identify patterns related to a specific problem relevant to their area of knowledge. But because nonexperts lack that base of knowledge, they are forced to rely more on their brain's ability for abstraction rather than specificity.
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Chefs think about what it's like to make food. Being a scientist in the kitchen is about asking why something works, and how it works.
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If you look at 'West Side Story,' a lot of those numbers are actually pretty cutty, but the cuts are always musically motivated.
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As I watched bookstores close, I began to wonder how that felt for the owners. Owning a bookstore was their dream and now they're struggling and seeing those dreams fall apart.
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Every book has to start with a first chapter, and I think that 'Middle of Nowhere,' 'Mmmbop' and 'Where Is the Love' are good places to start for us. I don't think it's a bad place.
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I like to think of myself as very loyal, and I love everyone I surround myself with, whether they're friends or girlfriends or whatever.
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I'm just taking one step at a time. I could zigzag one way, but it's not usually on purpose.
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I really loved animals when I was little - my friend and I had an imaginary vet's office; we would mime doing surgery on animals. We treated more injuries than illnesses - fixing with a baby bear with a broken leg, removing a tumor. Of course, our surgeries would take about five seconds; that's how good we were.
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25 years ago, when I started in New York, I had the pleasure to cook for Andy Warhol. At the time, I could have traded art for food - I should have done so, because I could get his work for nothing!
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I did 'Mad Men' and I still have people come up to me like, 'Are you actually a lesbian?' Really? Just because I play one on TV? People will think what they're gonna think.
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I try not to punish the audience by making them listen to too much acoustic guitar.
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We are fully aware that, in a world at war, each set of belligerents is over ready to regard those who are not with them as against them; but the course we have followed is a just course.
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The most perfect technique is that which is not noticed at all.
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I wrote for magazines. I wrote adventure stuff, I wrote for the 'National Enquirer,' I wrote advertising copy for cemeteries.
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It's all right when you are calling on a girl or talking with friends after dinner to run a conversation like a Sunday-school excursion, with stops to pick flowers; but in the office your sentences should be the shortest distance possible between periods.
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Wall Street has played a role in everyone's life, and it has been vilified by everyone, but I think that the average trader didn't have a sense of what was coming. The culture is so vacuous, it's possible to come to it straight out of college and never have a real adult life, even if you have the wife and kids.
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When I was 17, I was at La Coupole brasserie, and Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir asked me to join them at their table. They were fascinated that I'd watched their programme on existentialism back home and wanted to understand nothingness and being.
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I was partly old-fashioned and partly modern.
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Harry Dresden: The U.S. isn’t a perfect place, but it’s better than most people have managed to come up with. And all my stuff is there.
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Modernity widened the distance between the sensational and the relevant.
