Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes
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We learn the most from fools ... yet we pay them back with the worst ingratitude.
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Most so-called writers keep writing and writing with the hope, some day, to find something to say.
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Trading forces someone to think hard; those who merely work hard generally lose their focus and intellectual energy. In addition, they end up drowning in randomness; work ethics draw people to focus on noise rather than the signal.
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When conflicted between two choices, take neither.
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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.
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Intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant.
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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.
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A man is morally free when... he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity. This is not just an aim but an obligation.
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We favor the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated, and the tangible; we scorn the abstract.
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Injecting some confusion stabilizes the system.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Probability is a liberal art; it is a child of skepticism, not a tool for people with calculators on their belts to satisfy their desire to produce fancy calculations and certainties.
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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.
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When we want to do something while unconsciously certain to fail, we seek advice so we can blame someone else for the failure.
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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.
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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.
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A country's assets reside in the tinkerers, the hobbyists, and the risk-takers.
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The people I go after are the false experts, those who do not accept the limits of their knowledge.
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The best way to learn a language may be an episode of jail in a foreign country.
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What they call 'play' (gym, travel, sports) looks like work.
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Someone who says 'I am busy' is either declaring incompetence (and lack of control of his life) or trying to get rid of you.
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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.