Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes

210 Sourced Quotes

An idea starts to be interesting when you get scared of taking it to its logical conclusion.

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
For the classics philosophical insight was the product of a life of leisure; for me a life of leisure is the product of philosophical insight.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The sucker's trap is when you focus on what you know and what others don't know, rather than the reverse.

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
We favor the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated, and the tangible; we scorn the abstract.

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

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
We learn the most from fools... yet we pay them back with the worst ingratitude.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The irony of the process of thought control: the more energy you put into trying to control your ideas and what you think about, the more your ideas end up controlling you.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Delivering advice assumes that our cognitive apparatus rather than our emotional machinery exerts some meaningful control over our actions.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The best way to learn a language may be an episode of jail in a foreign country.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Charm is the ability to insult people without offending them.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Much of aging comes from a misunderstanding of the effect of comfort.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
You can tell how uninteresting a person is by asking him whom he finds interesting.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
While in theory randomness is an intrinsic property, in practice, randomness is incomplete information.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The book is the only medium left that hasn't been corrupted by the profane.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
An erudite is someone who displays less than he knows; a journalist or consultant the opposite.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Trading forces someone to think hard; those who merely work hard generally lose their focus and intellectual energy. In addition, they end up drowning in randomness; work ethics draw people to focus on noise rather than the signal.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
There is a saying that bad traders divorce their spouse sooner than abandon their positions. Loyalty to ideas is not a good thing for traders, scientists - or anyone.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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...

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Someone who says I am busy is either declaring incompetence (and lack of control of his life) or trying to get rid of you.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Modernity has replaced ethics with legalese, and the law can be gamed with a good lawyer.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
There is something more severe than the problem with Thomas Friedman, which can be generalized to represent someone causing action while being completely unaccountable for his words.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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.

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
What fools call wasting time is most often the best investment.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
When some systems are stuck in a dangerous impasse, randomness and only randomness can unlock them and set them free.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Decomposition, for most, starts when they leave the free, social, and uncorrupted college life for the solitary confinement of professions and nuclear families.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb