Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes

210 Sourced Quotes

Philosophers talk about truth and falsehood. People in life talk about payoff, exposure, and consequences (risks and rewards), hence fragility and antifragility. And sometimes philosophers and thinkers and those who study conflate Truth with risks and rewards.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
You get pseudo-order when you seek order; you only get a measure of order and control when you embrace randomness.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
We glorify those who left their names in history books at the expense of those contributors about whom our books are silent. We humans are not just a superficial race - we are a very unfair one.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The characteristic feature of the loser is to bemoan, in general terms, mankind's flaws, biases, contradictions, and irrationality - without exploiting them for fun and profit

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
There are secrets to our world that only practice can reveal, and no opinion or analysis will ever capture in full.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
You will be civilized on the day you can spend a long period doing nothing, learning nothing, and improving nothing, without feeling the slightest amount of guilt.

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

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Your reputation is harmed the most by what you say to defend it.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The traits I respect are erudition and the courage to stand up when half-men are afraid for their reputation. Any idiot can be intelligent.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
I remind myself of Einstein's remark that common sense is nothing but a collection of misconceptions acquired by age 18...

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
We tend to treat our knowledge as personal property to be protected and defended. It is an ornament that allows us to rise in the pecking order...we take what we know a little too seriously.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Being an entrepreneur is an existential, not just a financial thing.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Another definition of modernity: conversations can be more and more completely reconstructed with clips from other conversations taking place at the same time on the planet.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
We cannot truly plan, because we do not understand the future-but this is not necessarily a bad news. We could plan while bearing in mind such limitations. It just takes guts.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Every social association that is not face-to-face is injurious to your health.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
By setting oneself totally free of constraints, free of thoughts, free of this debilitating activity called work, free of efforts, elements hidden in the texture of reality start staring at you; then mysteries that you never thought existed emerge in front of your eyes.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Prediction, not narration, is the real test of our understanding of the world.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
It is also naïve empiricism to provide, in support of some argument, series of eloquent confirmatory quotes by dead authorities. By searching, you can always find someone who made a well-sounding statement that confirms your point of view and, on every topic, it is possible to find another dead thinker who said the exact opposite.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market alow you to put there.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The classical man's worst fear was inglorious death; the modern man's worst fear is just death

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
If you want to get an idea of a friend's temperament, ethics, and personal elegance, you need to look at him under the tests of severe circumstances, not under the regular rosy glow of daily life. Can you assess the danger a criminal poses by examining only what he does on an ordinary day? Can we understand health without considering wild diseases and epidemics? Indeed the normal is often irrelevant.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Consider that the turkey's experience may have, rather than no value, a negative value. It learned from observation, as we are all advised to do (hey, after all, this is what is believed to be the scientific method). Its confidence increased as the number of friendly feedings grew, and it felt increasingly safe even though the slaughter was more and more imminent. Consider that the feeling of safety reached its maximum when the risk was at the highest!

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
We didn't get where we are thanks to the sissy notion of resilience.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Maximum of an average is necessarily less volatile than the average maximum

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Daily news and sugar confuse our system in the same manner.

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

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb