Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes
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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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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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Asking science to explain life and vital matters is equivalent to asking a grammarian to explain poetry.
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Success is becoming in middle adulthood what you dreamed to be in late childhood.
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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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It is all about redundancy. Nature likes to overinsure itself.
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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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You want to be yourself, idiosyncratic; the collective (school, rules, jobs, technology) wants you generic to the point of castration.
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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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Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility.
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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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I always remind myself that what one observes is at best a combination of variance and returns, not just returns.
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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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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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In science you need to understand the world; in business you need others to misunderstand it.
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Greatness starts with the replacement of hatred with polite disdain.
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It is painful to think about ruthlessness as an engine of improvement.
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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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Mild success can be explainable by skills and labor. Wild success is attributable to variance.
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It’s harder to say no when you really mean it.
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What fools call 'wasting time' is most often the best investment.
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A theory is a very dangerous thing to have.