Nassim Nicholas Taleb quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Nassim Nicholas Taleb Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb on Wise Famous Quotes.

If you are in banking and lending, surprise outcomes are likely to be negative for you.

Love without sacrifice is like theft

For the antifragile, shocks bring more benefits (equivalently, less harm) as their intensity increases (up to a point).

Education is an institution that has been growing without external stressors; eventually the thing will collapse.

Mental clarity is the child of courage, not the other way around.

But the technology is only trivial retrospectively - not prospectively.

To become a successful philosopher king, it is much better to start as a king than as a philosopher,

Nobody reads the disclosures that roll down your computer screen. You click 'I agree' but you don't know what you're agreeing to.

If you ever do have to heed a forecast, keep in mind that its accuracy degrades rapidly as you extend it through time.

Social science means inventing a certain brand of human we can understand.

Most so-called writers keep writing and writing with the hope to, some day, find something to say.

The best philosophers were not academics, but had another job, so their philosophy was not corrupted by careerism.

Ideas come and go, stories stay.

If you need to listen to music while walking, don't walk; and please don't listen to music.

A random series will always present some detectable pattern. I

The difference between slaves in Roman and Ottoman days and today's employees is that slaves did not need to flatter their boss.

It is just that narrative can be lethal when used in the wrong places.

You may never know what type of person someone is unless they are given opportunities to violate moral or ethical codes.

So the modern world may be increasing in technological knowledge, but, paradoxically, it is making things a lot more unpredictable.

Suckers try to win arguments, nonsuckers try to win.

One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic." Statistics stay silent in us.

cocksure prophet. Where I beg to differ with the great

Breaking a fast feels like the exact opposite of a hangover.

A country's assets reside in the tinkerers, the hobbyists, and the risk-takers.

Avoid losers. If you hear someone use the words 'impossible', 'never', 'too difficult' too often, drop him or her from your social network.

Is the most antifragile place on the planet; it benefits from shocks that take place in the rest of the world.

We are built to be dupes for theories. But theories come and go; experience stays. Explanations

Most info-Web-media-newspaper types have a hard time swallowing the idea that knowledge is reached (mostly) by removing junk from peoples heads

Huet presents arguments against causality that are quite potent - he states, for instance, that any event can have an infinity of possible causes.

Life would be unbearably bland if we had no enemies on whom to waste efforts and energy.

Don't cross a river if it is four feet deep on average.

The more data we have, the more likely we are to drown in it.

Meditation is a way to be narcissistic without hurting anyone

The fool generalizes the particular; the nerd particularizes the general; some do both; and the wise does neither

Normative Economics is like religion without the aesthetics.

Heroes are heroes because they are heroic in behavior, not because they won or lost.

You are rich if money you refuse tastes better than money you accept.

We should reward people, not ridicule them, for thinking the impossible.

Is often a good career move for an author.

You want to be yourself, idiosyncratic; the collective (school, rules, jobs, technology) wants you generic to the point of castration.

Abundance is harder for us to handle than scarcity.

Regular minds find similarities in stories (and situations); finer minds detect differences.

Writing is sacred, other activities are profane, and I don't want them to corrupt my writing.

Too much success is the enemy, too much failure is demoralizing.

What they call "play" (gym, travel, sports) looks like work.

We would not even need a statistician; a second-rate engineer would do.

It seems that it is the most unsuccessful people who give the most advice, particularly for writing and financial matters.

The appearance of busyness reinforces the perception of causality, of the link between results, and one's role in them.

What fools call "wasting time" is most often the best investment.

Simplicity is not so simple to attain.

Half of the people lie with their lips; the other half with their tears

Interventionism depletes mental and economic resources; it is rarely available when it is needed the most.

Not seeing a tsunami or an economic event coming is excusable; building something fragile to them is not.

Karl Marx, a visionary, figured out that you can control a slave much better by convincing him he is an employee.

Modernity's double punishment is to make us both age prematurely and live longer.

awareness of a problem does not mean much - particularly when you have special interests and self-serving institutions in play.

Comfort makes you weaker. We need some variability, some stressors. Not too much, but just enough.

Fragility is the quality of things that are vulnerable to volatility.

Only the autodidacts are free. And not just in school matters - those who decommoditize, detouristify their lives.

Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness.

Things always become obvious after the fact

It does not matter how frequently something succeeds if failure is too costly to bear.

Realism is punishing. Probabilistic skepticism is worse.

You will get the most attention from those who hate you. No friend, no admirer and no partner will flatter you with as much curiosity.

Seneca and stoicism as a back door to explain why everything antifragile has to have more upside than downside

At no point in history have so many non-risk-takers, that is, those with no personal exposure, exerted so much control.

I am happy everywhere except in places where I see glitz and rich farts. I am happiest in Brooklyn, where the concentration of rich farts is minimal.

I always remind myself that what one observes is at best a combination of variance and returns, not just returns.

The best test of whether someone is extremely stupid (or extremely wise) is whether financial and political news makes sense to him.

To bankrupt a fool, give him information.

Patients who spend fifteen minutes every day writing an account of their daily troubles feel indeed better about what has befallen them. You

The opposite of manliness isn't cowardice; it's technology.

Years ago, I noticed one thing about economics, and that is that economists didn't get anything right.

There is a Yiddish saying: If I am going to be forced to eat pork, it better be of the best kind.

True humility is when you can surprise yourself more than others; the rest is either shyness or good marketing

It's not a good idea to take a forecast from someone wearing a tie. If possible, tease people who take themselves and their knowledge too seriously.

Luck is the grand equalizer.

Experience is devoid of the cherry-picking that we find in studies.

In other words, history teaches us to avoid the brand of naive empiricism that consists of learning from casual historical facts.

The people I go after are the false experts, those who do not accept the limits of their knowledge.

Corporations take the humanity out of trade - they take the happiness out and replace it with something that is ugly.

A system, artificially stabilized, and of course you have hidden risks under the surface, and you don't know where the risks are.

The implication is that we feel emotions (limbic brain) then find an explanation (neocortex). As

Believe me, it is tough to deal with the social consequences of the appearance of continuous failure. We are social animals; hell is other people.

There are systems that use failure as fuel for improvement, where the cost of failure is small.

Never take advice from someone wearing a tie.

Modernity starts with the state monopoly on violence, and ends with the state's monopoly on fiscal irresponsibility.

Rationalism crashes in the tails.

But they never notice the following inconsistency: this so-called worst-case event, when it happened, exceeded the worst case at the time.

Charm is the ability to insult people without offending them; nerdiness the reverse

It is far easier to figure out if something is fragile than to predict the occurrence of an event that may harm it.

Why do we keep focusing on the minutiae, not the possible significant large events, in spite of the obvious evidence of their huge influence?

...avoidance of small mistakes makes the large ones more severe.

Never ask a man if he is from Sparta: If he were, he would have let you know such an important fact - and if he were not, you could hurt his feelings.

For the robust, an error is information.

What made medicine fool people for so long was that its successes were prominently displayed and its mistakes (literally) buried.

Bailing out every bank that fails makes the system riskier, not safer.

There are two types of people: those who try to win and those who try to win arguments. They are never the same.

Probability is not about the odds, but about the belief in the existence of an alternative outcome, cause, or motive.

Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.