Nassim Nicholas Taleb - The Bed of Procrustes (2016)

93 Sourced Quotes

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

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
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
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
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
Older people are most beautiful when they have what is lacking in the young: poise, erudition, wisdom, phronesis, and this post-heroic absence of agitation.

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
Using, as an excuse, others' failure of common sense is in itself a failure of common sense.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
There is a certain category of fool—the overeducated, the academic, the journalist, the newspaper reader, the mechanistic "scientist", the pseudo-empiricist, those endowed with what I call "epistemic arrogance", this wonderful ability to discount what they did not see, the unobserved.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week's newspapers.

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

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
In science you need to understand the world; in business you need others to misunderstand it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The imagination of the genius vastly surpasses his intellect; the intellect of the academic vastly surpasses his imagination

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Those who do not think that employment is systemic slavery are either blind or employed.

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
I have respect for mother nature's methods of robustness (billions of years allow most of what is fragile to break); classical thought is more robust (in its respect for the unknown, the epistemic humility) than the modern post-Enlightenment naïve pseudoscientific autism. Thus my classical values make me advocate the triplet of erudition, elegance, and courage; against modernity's phoniness, nerdiness and philistinism

Nassim Nicholas Taleb