Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes
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If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud.
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I always remind myself that what one observes is at best a combination of variance and returns, not just returns.
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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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You want to be yourself, idiosyncratic; the collective (school, rules, jobs, technology) wants you generic to the point of castration.
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In science you need to understand the world; in business you need others to misunderstand it.
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My idea of the modern Stoic sage is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into information, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking.
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Nobody reads the disclosures that roll down your computer screen. You click 'I agree' but you don't know what you're agreeing to.
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Information is antifragile; it feeds more on attempts to harm it than it does on efforts to promote it.
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It does not matter how frequently something succeeds if failure is too costly to bear.
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Success is becoming in middle adulthood what you dreamed to be in late childhood.
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I suppose that the main benefit of being rich (over just being independent) is to be able to despise rich people (a good concentration of whom you find in glitzy ski resorts) without any sour grapes. It is even sweeter when these farts don't know that you are richer than they are.
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While in theory randomness is an intrinsic property, in practice, randomness is incomplete information.
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Older people are most beautiful when they have what is lacking in the young: poise, erudition, wisdom, phronesis, and this post-heroic absence of agitation.
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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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This is the central illusion in life: that randomness is a risk, that it is a bad thing ...
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It is all about redundancy. Nature likes to overinsure itself.
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The same past data can confirm a theory and its exact opposite! If you survive until tomorrow, it could mean that either a) you are more likely to be immortal or b) that you are closer to death.
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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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Charm is the ability to insult people without offending them; nerdiness the reverse.
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A theory is a very dangerous thing to have.
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Using, as an excuse, others’ failure of common sense is in itself a failure of common sense.
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A man is honorable in proportion to the personal risks he takes for his opinion.
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If I could predict what my day would exactly look like, I would feel a little bit dead.
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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.