Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes
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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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A competitive athlete is painful to look at; trying hard to become an animal rather than a man, he will never be as fast as a cheetah or as strong as an ox.
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When conflicted between two choices, take neither.
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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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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.
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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.
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You can tell how uninteresting a person is by asking him whom he finds interesting.
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If humans fight the last war, nature fights the next one.
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What they call 'play' (gym, travel, sports) looks like work.
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The fool generalizes the particular; the nerd particularizes the general; ... the wise does neither.
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This makes living in big cities invaluable because you increase the odds of serendipitous encounters - you gain exposure to the envelope of serendipity.
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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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But it remains the case that you know what is wrong with a lot more confidence than you know what is right.
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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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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.
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In science you need to understand the world; in business you need others to misunderstand it.
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What fools call 'wasting time' is most often the best investment.
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Mild success can be explainable by skills and labor. Wild success is attributable to variance.
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The best test of whether someone is extremely stupid (or extremely wise) is whether financial and political news makes sense to him.
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Forecasting by bureaucrats tends to be used for anxiety relief rather than for adequate policy making.
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This is the central illusion in life: that randomness is a risk, that it is a bad thing ...
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Greatness starts with the replacement of hatred with polite disdain.
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Failure saves lives. In the airline industry, every time a plane crashes the probability of the next crash is lowered by that. The Titanic saved lives because we're building bigger and bigger ships. So these people died, but we have effectively improved the safety of the system, and nothing failed in vain.