Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes
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It is often the mistakes of others that benefit the rest of us-and, sadly, not them ... For the antifragile, harm from errors should be less than the benefits.
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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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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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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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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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Success is becoming in middle adulthood what you dreamed to be in late childhood.
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What fools call 'wasting time' is most often the best investment.
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Using leverage to cure the problems of too much leverage is not homeopathy, it is denial. The debt crisis is not a temporary problem, it is a structural one. We need rehab.
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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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Greatness starts with the replacement of hatred with polite disdain.
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It is the asymmetry of the bonus system that got us here. No incentives without disincentives: capitalism is about rewards and punishments, not just rewards.
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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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What they call 'play' (gym, travel, sports) looks like work.
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Probability is not about the odds, but about the belief in the existence of an alternative outcome, cause, or motive.
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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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It is painful to think about ruthlessness as an engine of improvement.
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In science you need to understand the world; in business you need others to misunderstand it.
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Mild success can be explainable by skills and labor. Wild success is attributable to variance.
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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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Information is antifragile; it feeds more on attempts to harm it than it does on efforts to promote it.
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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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A theory is a very dangerous thing to have.
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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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It is all about redundancy. Nature likes to overinsure itself.