Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes
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What they call 'play' (gym, travel, sports) looks like work.
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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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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.
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You want to be yourself, idiosyncratic; the collective (school, rules, jobs, technology) wants you generic to the point of castration.
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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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We tend to use knowledge as therapy.
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If humans fight the last war, nature fights the next one.
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Only in recent history has 'working hard' signaled pride rather than shame for lack of talent, finesse and, mostly, sprezzatura.
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The fool generalizes the particular; the nerd particularizes the general; ... the wise does neither.
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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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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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This is the central illusion in life: that randomness is a risk, that it is a bad thing ...
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Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness.
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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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Mild success can be explainable by skills and labor. Wild success is attributable to variance.
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Greatness starts with the replacement of hatred with polite disdain.
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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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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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Our greatest asset is the one we distrust the most: the built-in antifragility of certain risk-taking systems.
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What fools call 'wasting time' is most often the best investment.
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I want to live happily in a world I don't understand.
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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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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.
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Forecasting by bureaucrats tends to be used for anxiety relief rather than for adequate policy making.