Nassim Nicholas Taleb - Life Quotes

15 Sourced Quotes

View all Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes
Those who were unlucky in life in spite of their skills would eventually rise. The lucky fool might have benefited from some luck in life; over the longer run he would slowly converge to the state of a less-lucky idiot. Each one would revert to his long-term properties.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Modernity: we created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Asking science to explain life and vital matters is equivalent to asking a grammarian to explain poetry.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Economic life should be definancialised. We should learn not to use markets as storehouses of value: they do not harbour the certainties that normal citizens require. Citizens should experience anxiety about their own businesses (which they control), not their investments (which they do not control).

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Much of modern life is preventable chronic stress injury.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Preoccupation with efficacy is the main obstacle to a poetic, elegant, robust and heroic life.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Half of life—the interesting half of life—we don't even have a name for.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
This is the central illusion in life: that randomness is a risk, that it is a bad thing...

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
You have a real life if and only if you do not compete with anyone in any of your pursuits.

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
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
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
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
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