Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes
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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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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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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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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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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 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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Economists are evaluated on how intelligent they sound, not on a scientific measure of their knowledge of reality. (page 85)
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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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Charm is the ability to insult people without offending them; nerdiness the reverse.
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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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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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Success is becoming in middle adulthood what you dreamed to be in late childhood.
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It does not matter how frequently something succeeds if failure is too costly to bear.
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While in theory randomness is an intrinsic property, in practice, randomness is incomplete information.
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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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In science you need to understand the world; in business you need others to misunderstand it.
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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 is the central illusion in life: that randomness is a risk, that it is a bad thing ...
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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.
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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.