Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes
-
If I could predict what my day would exactly look like, I would feel a little bit dead.
-
A man is honorable in proportion to the personal risks he takes for his opinion.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Much of aging comes from a misunderstanding of the effect of comfort.
-
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.
-
You may not be able to change the world but can at least get some entertainment and make a living out of the epistemic arrogance of the human race.
-
My idea of the modern Stoic sage is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into information, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking.
-
Economics is a narrative discipline, and explanations are easy to fit retrospectively. (page 257)
-
You can tell how uninteresting a person is by asking him whom he finds interesting.
-
Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility.
-
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).
-
A theory is a very dangerous thing to have.
-
It’s harder to say no when you really mean it.
-
He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once.
-
An idea starts to be interesting when you get scared of taking it to its logical conclusion.
-
Probability is not about the odds, but about the belief in the existence of an alternative outcome, cause, or motive.
-
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.
-
What is nonmeasurable and nonpredictable will remain nonmeasurable and nonpredictable ... no matter how much hate mail I get.
-
You exist if and only if you are free to do things without a visible objective, with no justification and, above all, outside the dictatorship of someone else’s narrative.
-
It is painful to think about ruthlessness as an engine of improvement.
-
Much of modern life is preventable chronic stress injury.
-
Categorizing is necessary for humans, but it becomes pathological when the category is seen as definitive, preventing people from considering the fuzziness of boundaries, let alone revising their categories.
-
Daily news and sugar confuse our system in the same manner.