Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes
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In science you need to understand the world; in business you need others to misunderstand it.
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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 no such thing as a failed soldier, dead or alive (unless he acted in a cowardly manner)-likewise there is no such thing as a failed entrepreneur or failed scientific researcher ...
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Mild success can be explainable by skills and labor. Wild success is attributable to variance.
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Asking science to explain life and vital matters is equivalent to asking a grammarian to explain poetry.
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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 tragedy of virtue is that the more obvious, boring, unoriginal, and sermonizing the proverb, the harder it is to implement.
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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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Economists are evaluated on how intelligent they sound, not on a scientific measure of their knowledge of reality. (page 85)
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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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The difference between slaves in Roman and Ottoman days and today’s employees is that slaves did not need to flatter their boss.
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What fools call 'wasting time' is most often the best investment.
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Charm is the ability to insult people without offending them; nerdiness the reverse.
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Success is becoming in middle adulthood what you dreamed to be in late childhood.
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Lucky fools do not bear the slightest suspicion that they may be lucky fools - by definition, they do not know that they belong to such a category.
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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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It does not matter how frequently something succeeds if failure is too costly to bear.
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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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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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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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If I could predict what my day would exactly look like, I would feel a little bit dead.
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Don't cross a river if it is four feet deep on average.
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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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While in theory randomness is an intrinsic property, in practice, randomness is incomplete information.