Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes
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Don't cross a river if it is four feet deep on average.
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Economics is a narrative discipline, and explanations are easy to fit retrospectively. (page 257)
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Success is becoming in middle adulthood what you dreamed to be in late childhood.
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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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Much of the research into humans' risk-avoidance machinery shows that it is antiquated and unfit for the modern world; it is made to counter repeatable attacks and learn from specifics. If someone narrowly escapes being eaten by a tiger in a certain cave, then he learns to avoid that cave.
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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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While in theory randomness is an intrinsic property, in practice, randomness is incomplete information.
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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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It’s harder to say no when you really mean it.
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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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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.
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An idea starts to be interesting when you get scared of taking it to its logical conclusion.
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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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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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He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once.
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A theory is a very dangerous thing to have.
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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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Probability is not about the odds, but about the belief in the existence of an alternative outcome, cause, or motive.
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Decomposition, for most, starts when they leave the free, social, and uncorrupted college life for the solitary confinement of professions and nuclear families.
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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.
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Much of aging comes from a misunderstanding of the effect of comfort.
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Much of modern life is preventable chronic stress injury.
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What is nonmeasurable and nonpredictable will remain nonmeasurable and nonpredictable ... no matter how much hate mail I get.