Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes

210 Sourced Quotes

Weak men act to satisfy their needs, stronger men their duties.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
If my detractors knew me better they would hate me even more.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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 only valid political system is one that can handle an imbecile in power without suffering from it

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
If you sat with a pencil and jotted down all the decisions you've taken in the past week, or, if you could, over your lifetime, you would realize that almost all of them have had asymmetric payoff, with one side carrying a larger consequence than the other. You decide principally based on fragility, not probability. Or to rephrase, You decide principally based on fragility, not so much on True/False.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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
To succeed in life requires a total inability to do anything that makes you uncomfortable when you look at yourself in the mirror.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The fastest way to become rich is to socialize with the poor; the fastest way to become poor is to socialize with the rich.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
A verbal threat is the most authentic certificate of impotence.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
My point taken further is that True and False (hence what we call "belief") play a poor, secondary role in human decisions; it is the payoff from the True and the False that dominates-and it is almost always asymmetric, with one consequence much bigger than the other, i.e., harboring positive and negative asymmetries (fragile or antifragile). Let me explain.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The payoff of a human venture is, in general, inversely proportional to what it is expected to be.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Never ask a trader if he is profitable: you can easily see it in his gesture and gait.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb