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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While in theory randomness is an intrinsic property, in practice, randomness is incomplete information.
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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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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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You want to be yourself, idiosyncratic; the collective (school, rules, jobs, technology) wants you generic to the point of castration.
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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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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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This is the central illusion in life: that randomness is a risk, that it is a bad thing ...
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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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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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Charm is the ability to insult people without offending them; nerdiness the reverse.
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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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It is all about redundancy. Nature likes to overinsure itself.
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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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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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A theory is a very dangerous thing to have.
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Economic life should be definancialised. We should learn not to use markets as storehouses of value: they do not harbour the certainties that normal citizens require. Citizens should experience anxiety about their own businesses (which they control), not their investments (which they do not control).
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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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A man is honorable in proportion to the personal risks he takes for his opinion.
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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.