Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes
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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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Modernity: we created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur.
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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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You can tell how uninteresting a person is by asking him whom he finds interesting.
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Restaurants get you in with food to sell you liquor; religions get you in with belief to sell you rules.
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Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love.
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The sucker’s trap is when you focus on what you know and what others don’t know, rather than the reverse.
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Daily news and sugar confuse our system in the same manner.
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Modernity has replaced ethics with legalese.
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There is no effective difference between guessing a variable that is not random, but for which information is partial or deficient (...), and a random one (...). In this sense, guessing (what I don't know, but what someone else may know) and predicting (what has not taken place yet) are the same thing.
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We didn't get where we are thanks to the sissy notion of resilience.
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Cumulative errors depend largely on the big surprises, the big opportunities. Not only do economic, financial, and political predictors miss them, but they are quite ashamed to say anything outlandish to their clients - and yet events, it turns out, are almost always outlandish.
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A mistake is not something to be determined after the fact, but in the light of the information until that point.
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The twentieth century was the bankruptcy of the social utopia; the twenty-first will be that of the technological one.
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The fragile wants tranquility, the antifragile grows from disorder, and the robust doesn't care too much.
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Ethical man accords his profession to his beliefs, instead of according his beliefs to his profession.
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This makes living in big cities invaluable because you increase the odds of serendipitous encounters - you gain exposure to the envelope of serendipity.
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History is opaque. You see what comes out, not the script that produces events, ... The generator of historical events is different from the events themselves, much as the minds of the gods cannot be read just by witnessing their deeds.
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An option hides where we don't want it to hide.
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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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I try to make money infrequently, as infrequently as possible simply because I believe that rare events are not fairly valued, and that the rarer the event, the more undervalued it will be in price.
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You can be an intellectual yet still be an idiot. 'Educated philistines' have been wrong on everything from Stalinism to Iraq to low-carb diets.