Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes

210 Sourced Quotes

The number of managers with great track records in a given market depends far more on the number of people who started in the investment business (in place of going to dental school), rather than on their ability to produce profits.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.

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
Hard science gives sensational results with a horribly boring process; philosophy gives boring results with a sensational process; literature gives sensational results with a sensational process; and economics gives boring results with a boring process.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness.

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
Education makes the wise slightly wiser, but it makes the fool vastly more dangerous.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Scientists may be in the business of laughing at their predecessors, but owing to an array of human mental dispositions, few realize that someone will laugh at their beliefs in the (disappointingly near) future.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Redundancy is ambiguous because it seems like a waste if nothing unusual happens. Except that something unusual happens-usually.

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
The curious mind embraces science; the gifted and sensitive, the arts; the practical, business; the leftover becomes an economist

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
If I could predict what my day would exactly look like, I would feel a little bit dead.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
It is the asymmetry of the bonus system that got us here. No incentives without disincentives: capitalism is about rewards and punishments, not just 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 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
People are much less interested in what you are trying to show them than what you are trying to hide.

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

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
Modernity needs to understand that being rich and becoming rich are not mathematically, personally, socially, and ethically the same thing.

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Only Ponzi schemes should depend on confidence. Governments should never need to restore confidence. Cascading rumours are a product of complex systems. Governments cannot stop the rumours. Simply, we need to be in a position to shrug off rumours, be robust in the face of them.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
A man is honorable in proportion to the personal risks he takes for his opinion.

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