Top 500 Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Redundancy is ambiguous because it seems like a waste if nothing unusual happens. Except that something unusual happens-usually .”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

102. “Courage is the only virtue you cannot fake.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

103. “We tend to use knowledge as therapy.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

104. “Democracies can’t handle austerity measures very well.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

105. “It’s harder to say no when you really mean it.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

106. “Wear your best for your execution and stand dignified. Your last recourse against randomness is how you act – if you can’t control outcomes, you can control the elegance of your behaviour. You will always have the last word.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

107. “Scars signal skin in the game.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

108. “Asking science to explain life and vital matters is equivalent to asking a grammarian to explain poetry.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

109. “Answer e-mails from junior people before more senior ones. Junior people have further to go and tend to remember who slighted them.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

110. “When you write, you don’t have the social constraints of having people in front of you, so you talk about abstract matters.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

111. “Entrepreneurs are heroes in our society. They fail for the rest of us.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

112. “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

113. “You never win an argument until they attack your person.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

114. “The best way to learn a language may be an episode of jail in a foreign country.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

115. “Simplicity is not so simple to attain.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

116. “If you don’t feel that you haven’t read enough, you haven’t read enough.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

117. “Those who talk should do and only those who do should talk.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

118. “It takes extraordinary wisdom and self-control to accept that many things have a logic we do not understand that is smarter than our own.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

119. “Wind extinguishes a candle and energizes fire.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

120. “Modernity: we created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

121. “Let me be more aggressive: we are largely better at doing than we are at thinking, thanks to antifragility. I’d rather be dumb and antifragile than extremely smart and fragile, any time.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

122. “The more data we have, the more likely we are to drown in it.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

123. “Your reputation is harmed the most by what you say to defend it.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

124. “Success is about honour, feeling morally calibrated, absence of shame, not what some newspaper defines from an external metric.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

125. “As countries get rich they start increasing education and the very educated people tend to not like trial and error, because they think they’re obligated to use the body of knowledge they have.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

126. “Most people are sceptical about the wrong things and gullible about the wrong things.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

127. “Meditation is a way to be narcissistic without hurting anyone.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

128. “If you’re going to fail, you’d rather fail early than fail late in general.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

129. “You have family-owned businesses that have been around for 500 years. You cannot name a corporation that survives intact for even a few decades.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

130. “If you do not take risks for your opinion, you are nothing.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

131. “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

132. “The knowledge we get by tinkering, via trial and error, experience, and the workings of time, in other words, contact with the earth, is vastly superior to that obtained through reasoning, something self-serving institutions have been very busy hiding from us.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

133. “Go to parties. You can’t even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

134. “Banks have never made money in the history of banking, losing the equivalent of all their past profits periodically – while bankers strike it rich.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

135. “An elephant is vastly more efficient, metabolically, than a mouse. It’s the same for a megacity as opposed to a village. But an elephant can break a leg very easily, whereas you can toss a mouse out of a window and it’ll be fine. Size makes you fragile.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

136. “Mathematicians think in symbols, physicists in objects, philosophers in concepts, geometers in images, jurists in constructs, logicians in operators, writers in impressions, and idiots in words.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

137. “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

138. “Avoid taking advice from someone who gives advice for a living, unless there is a penalty for their advice.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

139. “Curiosity is antifragile, like an addiction, and is magnified by attempts to satisfy it – books have a secret mission and ability to multiply, as everyone who has wall-to-wall bookshelves knows well.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

140. “It does not matter how frequently something succeeds if failure is too costly to bear.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

141. “You need a story to displace a story.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

142. “If you want to annoy a poet, explain his poetry.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

143. “At no point in history have so many non-risk-takers, that is, those with no personal exposure, exerted so much control.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

144. “The classical man’s worst fear was inglorious death; the modern man’s worst fear is just death.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

145. “Ideas come and go, stories stay.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

146. “Contra the prevailing belief, “success” isn’t being on top of a hierarchy, it is standing outside all hierarchies.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

147. “Amateurs in any discipline are the best, if you can connect with them. Unlike dilettantes, career professionals are to knowledge what prostitutes are to love.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

148. “Read books are far less valuable than unread ones.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

149. “Writing is the art of repeating oneself without anyone noticing.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

150. “Make sure that you are in a situation where the constant mistakes are small and can be used for something.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb