Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes
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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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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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The fool generalizes the particular; the nerd particularizes the general; ... the wise does neither.
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For the robust, an error is information.
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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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Just as being nice to the arrogant is no better than being arrogant toward the nice; being accommodating toward anyone committing a nefarious action condones it.
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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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We tend to use knowledge as therapy.
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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.
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Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness.
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I want to live happily in a world I don't understand.
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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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You want to be yourself, idiosyncratic; the collective (school, rules, jobs, technology) wants you generic to the point of castration.
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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....
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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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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.
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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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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 humans fight the last war, nature fights the next one.
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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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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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If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud.