Nassim Nicholas Taleb - The Bed of Procrustes (2016)

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The tragedy of virtue is that the more obvious, boring, unoriginal, and sermonizing the proverb, the harder it is to implement.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Social science means inventing a certain brand of human we can understand.

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
What they call play (gym, travel, sports) looks like work.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Greatness starts with the replacement of hatred with polite disdain.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
They are born, put in a box; they go home to live in a box; they study by ticking boxes; they go to what is called work in a box, where they sit in their cubicle box; they drive to the grocery store in a box to buy food in a box; they talk about thinking outside the box ; and when they die they are put in a box.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Because our minds need to reduce information, we are more likely to try to squeeze a phenomenon into the Procrustean bed of a crisp and known category (amputating the unknown), rather than suspend categorization, and make it tangible. Thanks to our detections of false patterns, along with real ones, what is random will appear less random and more certain—our overactive brains are more likely to impose the wrong, simplistic, narrative than no narrative at all.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
A competitive athlete is painful to look at; trying hard to become an animal rather than a man, he will never be as fast as a cheetah or as strong as an ox.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
You are rich if and only if money you refuse tastes better than money you accept.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Success is becoming in middle adulthood what you dreamed to be in late childhood.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The problem of knowledge is that there are many more books on birds written by ornithologists than books on birds written by birds and books on ornithologists written by birds

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Procrastination is the soul rebelling against entrapment.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
People focus on role models; it is more effective to find antimodels - people you don't want to resemble when you grow up

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
When we want to do something while unconsciously certain to fail, we seek advice so we can blame someone else for the failure.

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
Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Writing is the art of repeating oneself without anyone noticing.

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
Ethical man accords his profession to his beliefs, instead of according his beliefs to his profession.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
You will get the most attention from those who hate you. No friend, no admirer and no partner will flatter you with as much curiosity.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The weak shows his strength and hides his weaknesses; the magnificent exhibits his weaknesses like ornaments.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The best test of whether someone is extremely stupid (or extremely wise) is whether financial and political news makes sense to him.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
My best definition of a nerd: someone who asks you to explain an aphorism

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
By all means, avoid words—threats, complaints, justification, narratives, reframing, attempts to win arguments, supplications; avoid words!

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
A man without a heroic bent starts dying at the age of thirty.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Restaurants get you in with food to sell you liquor; religions get you in with belief to sell you rules.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness.

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Just as dyed hair makes older men less attractive, it is what you do to hide your weaknesses that makes them repugnant.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
You exist if and only if you are free to do things without a visible objective, with no justification and, above all, outside the dictatorship of someone else's narrative.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb