Top 500 Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Procrastination is the soul rebelling against entrapment.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

52. “The inability to predict outliers implies the inability to predict the course of history.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

53. “Half of the people lie with their lips; the other half with their tears.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

55. “Never ask anyone for their opinion, forecast, or recommendation. Just ask them what they have – or don’t have – in their portfolio.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

56. “A verbal threat is the most authentic certificate of impotence.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

57. “An ad hominem attack against an individual, not against an idea, is highly flattering. It indicates that the person does not have anything intelligent to say about your message.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

58. “Charm is the ability to insult people without offending them; nerdiness the reverse.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

60. “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

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

62. “Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

63. “Anything that provides you with very, very stable income, very stable conditions, maybe generally stable, that often, it masks real risks, risks of blow-ups.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

64. “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

65. “Work hard, not in grunt work, but in chasing such opportunities and maximizing exposure to them. This makes living in big cities invaluable because you increase the odds of serendipitous encounters-you gain exposure to the envelope of serendipity.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

66. “If I could predict what my day would exactly look like, I would feel a little bit dead.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

67. “Wittgenstein’s ruler: Unless you have confidence in the ruler’s reliability, if you use a ruler to measure a table you may also be using the table to measure the ruler.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

68. “Success is becoming in middle adulthood what you dreamed to be in late childhood.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

69. “It is a sign of weakness to avoid showing signs of weakness.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

70. “The best philosophers were not academics, but had another job, so their philosophy was not corrupted by careerism.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

72. “A good maxim allows you to have the last word without even starting a conversation.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

73. “Karl Marx, a visionary, figured out that you can control a slave much better by convincing him he is an employee.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

74. “When an investor focuses on short-term investments, he or she is observing the variability of the portfolio, not the returns – in short, being fooled by randomness.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

75. “The Internet allows the small guy a global marketplace. But technology is harmful in the sense that we get too much information from it. Because of the web we get 10 times the amount of noise we ever got, which makes harmful fallacies far more likely.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

76. “Social science means inventing a certain brand of human we can understand.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

77. “Only in recent history has “working hard” signaled pride rather than shame for lack of talent, finesse and, mostly, sprezzatura .”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

78. “Difficulty is what wakes up the genius.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

79. “If my detractors knew me better they would hate me even more.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

80. “The person you are most afraid to contradict is yourself.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

81. “Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

82. “Probability is not about the odds, but about the belief in the existence of an alternative outcome, cause, or motive.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

83. “Never ask a trader if he is profitable: you can easily see it in his gesture and gait.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

84. “It is my great hope someday, to see science and decision makers rediscover what the ancients have always known. Namely that our highest currency is respect.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

85. “People are much less interested in what you are trying to show them than what you are trying to hide.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

86. “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

87. “The curious mind embraces science; the gifted and sensitive, the arts; the practical, business; the leftover becomes an economist.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

88. “An erudite is someone who displays less than he knows; a journalist or consultant the opposite.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

89. “When you beat up someone physically, you get excercise and stress relief; when you assault him verbally on the Internet, you just harm yourself.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

90. “Wind extinguishes a candle and energizes fire. Likewise with randomness, uncertainty, chaos: you want to use them, not hide from them. You want to be the fire and wish for the wind.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

91. “If it costs you your peace, it’s too expensive.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

92. “Mathematics is not just a “numbers game”, it is a way of thinking.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

93. “I disagree with the followers of Marx and those of Adam Smith: the reason free markets work is because they allow people to be lucky, thanks to aggressive trial and error, not by giving rewards or “incentives” for skill.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

94. “When I trade, I don’t have an agency problem; I have my neck on the line. When a bank or banker trades, it’s not his neck on the line.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

95. “It has been more profitable for us to bind together in the wrong direction than to be alone in the right one.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

96. “Globalization has created this interlocking fragility. At no time in the history of the universe has the cancellation of a Christmas order in New York meant layoffs in China.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

97. “Never think that lack of variability is stability. Don’t confuse lack of volatility with stability, ever.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

98. “Much of modern life is preventable chronic stress injury.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

99. “Mental clarity is the child of courage, not the other way around.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

100. “Steve Jobs: “People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb