Top 500 Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “A Stoic is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into transformation, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

2. “Don’t aim to be perfect! Aim to be antifragile.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

3. “The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

4. “Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

5. “Learn to fail with pride – and do so fast and cleanly. Maximise trial and error – by mastering the error part.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

6. “Weak men act to satisfy their needs, stronger men their duties.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

7. “If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

8. “Bitcoin is the beginning of something great: a currency without a government, something necessary and imperative.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

9. “Missing a train is only painful if you run after it! Likewise, not matching the idea of success others expect from you is only painful if that’s what you are seeking.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

10. “Comfort makes you weaker. We need some variability, some stressors. Not too much, but just enough.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

11. “For the robust, an error is information.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

12. “The fool generalizes the particular; the nerd particularizes the general; some do both; and the wise does neither.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

13. “What I learned on my own I still remember.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

14. “Remember that you are a Black Swan.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

15. “Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg didn’t finish college. Too much emphasis is placed on formal education – I told my children not to worry about their grades but to enjoy learning.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

16. “They will envy you for your success, your wealth, for your intelligence, for your looks, for your status – but rarely for your wisdom.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

17. “Dress your best on your execution day. Be extremely courteous to your assistant when you lose money. Try not to blame others for your fate, even if they deserve blame. Never exhibit any self-pity. Do not complain.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Featured in: Fate Quotes

18. “This is the central illusion in life: that randomness is a risk, that it is a bad thing...”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

19. “Heroes are heroes because they are heroic in behavior, not because they won or lost.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

20. “The fragile wants tranquility, the antifragile grows from disorder, and the robust doesn’t care too much.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

21. “Suckers try to win arguments, nonsuckers try to win.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

22. “Love without sacrifice is like theft.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

23. “Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love; close enough on the surface but, to the non-sucker, not exactly the same thing.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

24. “The difference between technology and slavery is that slaves are fully aware that they are not free.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

26. “The central idea in The Black Swan is that: rare events cannot be estimated from empirical observation since they are rare.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

28. “Injecting some confusion stabilizes the system.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

29. “You find peace by coming to terms with what you don’t know.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

30. “A man without a heroic bent starts dying at the age of thirty.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

31. “Those who do not think that employment is systemic slavery are either blind or employed.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

32. “To bankrupt a fool, give him information.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

34. “My major hobby is teasing people who take themselves and the quality of their knowledge too seriously and those who don’t have the guts to sometimes say: I don’t know...”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

35. “Things always become obvious after the fact.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

36. “The weak shows his strength and hides his weaknesses; the magnificent exhibits his weaknesses like ornaments.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

38. “I want to live happily in a world I don’t understand.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

39. “The opposite of manliness isn’t cowardice; it’s technology.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

40. “We know from chaos theory that even if you had a perfect model of the world, you’d need infinite precision in order to predict future events. With sociopolitical or economic phenomena, we don’t have anything like that.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

42. “Intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

43. “Failure saves lives. In the airline industry, every time a plane crashes the probability of the next crash is lowered by that.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

44. “Never take advice from someone wearing a tie.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

45. “Information is antifragile; it feeds more on attempts to harm it than it does on efforts to promote it.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

46. “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

47. “There are systems that use failure as fuel for improvement, where the cost of failure is small.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

48. “Don’t cross a river if it is four feet deep on average.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

49. “History doesn’t crawl; it leaps.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

50. “Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW. You need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel or a private jet.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb