Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes
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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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Our greatest asset is the one we distrust the most: the built-in antifragility of certain risk-taking systems.
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I want to live happily in a world I don't understand.
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There is a saying that bad traders divorce their spouse sooner than abandon their positions. Loyalty to ideas is not a good thing for traders, scientists - or anyone.
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Charm is the ability to insult people without offending them; nerdiness the reverse.
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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 takes extraordinary wisdom and self-control to accept that many things have a logic we do not understand that is smarter than our own.
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It does not matter how frequently something succeeds if failure is too costly to bear.
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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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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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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 tragedy of virtue is that the more obvious, boring, unoriginal, and sermonizing the proverb, the harder it is to implement.
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If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud.
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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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Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility.
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The economics establishment (universities, regulators, central bankers, government officials, various organisations staffed with economists) lost its legitimacy with the failure of the system. It is irresponsible and foolish to put our trust in the ability of such experts to get us out of this mess. Instead, find the smart people whose hands are clean.
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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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Asking science to explain life and vital matters is equivalent to asking a grammarian to explain poetry.
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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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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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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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Success is becoming in middle adulthood what you dreamed to be in late childhood.
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They are born, put in a box; they go home to live in a box; they study by ticking boxes; they go to what is called 'work' in a box, where they sit in their cubicle box; they drive to the grocery store in a box to buy food in a box; they talk about thinking 'outside the box'; and when they die they are put in a box.
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Using, as an excuse, others’ failure of common sense is in itself a failure of common sense.