Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes
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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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When conflicted between two choices, take neither.
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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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The fool generalizes the particular; the nerd particularizes the general; ... the wise does neither.
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If humans fight the last war, nature fights the next one.
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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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The best way to learn a language may be an episode of jail in a foreign country.
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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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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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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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You can tell how uninteresting a person is by asking him whom he finds interesting.
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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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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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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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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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What they call 'play' (gym, travel, sports) looks like work.
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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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What fools call 'wasting time' is most often the best investment.
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Forecasting by bureaucrats tends to be used for anxiety relief rather than for adequate policy making.
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Mild success can be explainable by skills and labor. Wild success is attributable to variance.
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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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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.