Top 500 Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “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

202. “Those who think religion is about “belief” don’t understand religion, and don’t understand belief.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

203. “Wisdom in the young is as unattractive as frivolity in the elderly.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

204. “More data means more information, but it also means more false information.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

205. “So you become numb to insults, particularly if you teach yourself to imagine that the person uttering them is a variant of a noisy ape with little personal control. Just keep your composure, smile, focus on analyzing the speaker not the message, and you’ll win the argument. An ad hominem attack against an intellectual, not against an idea, is highly flattering. It indicates that the person does not have anything intelligent to say about your message. The psychologist.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

206. “A squeeze occurs when people have no choice but to do something, and do it right away, regardless of the costs.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

207. “Books to me are not expanded journal articles, but reading experiences, and the academics who tend to read in order to cite in their writing – rather than read for enjoyment, curiosity, or simply because they like to read – tend to be frustrated when they can’t rapidly scan the text and summarize it in one sentence that connects it to some existing discourse in which they have been involved.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

208. “How much you truly “believe” in something can be manifested only through what you are willing to risk for it.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

209. “My biggest problem with modernity may lie in the growing separation of the ethical and the legal.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

210. “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

211. “Do not pay attention to what people say, only to what they do, and how much of their necks they are putting on the line.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

212. “A country’s assets reside in the tinkerers, the hobbyists, and the risk-takers.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

213. “The psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has a simple heuristic. Never ask the doctor what you should do. Ask him what he would do if he were in your place. You would be surprised at the difference.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

214. “We should reward people, not ridicule them, for thinking the impossible.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

215. “My lesson from Soros is to start every meeting at my boutique by convincing everyone that we are a bunch of idiots who know nothing and are mistake-prone, but happen to be endowed with the rare privilege of knowing it.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

216. “When you develop your opinions on the basis of weak evidence, you will have difficulty interpreting subsequent information that contradicts these opinions, even if this new information is obviously more accurate.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

217. “When you ask people, ‘What’s the opposite of fragile?,’ they tend to say robust, resilient, adaptable, solid, strong. That’s not it. The opposite of fragile is something that gains from disorder.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

218. “The twentieth century was the bankruptcy of the social utopia; the twenty-first will be that of the technological one.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

219. “Freedom is always associated with risk taking, whether it leads to it or comes from it.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

220. “Learning is rooted in repetition and convexity, meaning that the reading of a single text twice is more profitable than reading two different things once.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

221. “Experience is devoid of the cherry-picking that we find in studies.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

222. “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

223. “Scepticism is effortful and costly. It is better to be sceptical about matters of large consequences, and be imperfect, foolish and human in the small and the aesthetic.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

224. “Technology is the result of antifragility, exploited by risk-takers in the form of tinkering and trial and error, with nerd-driven design confined to the backstage.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

225. “Please, don’t drive a school bus blindfolded.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

226. “For I have a single definition of success: you look in the mirror every evening, and wonder if you disappoint the person you were at 18, right before the age when people start getting corrupted by life. Let him or her be the only judge; not your reputation, not your wealth, not your standing in the community, not the decorations on your lapel. If you do not feel ashamed, you are successful. All other definitions of success are modern constructions; fragile modern constructions.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

227. “There are two types of people: those who try to win and those who try to win arguments. They are never the same.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

228. “The quality of a decision cannot be solely judged based on its outcome.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

229. “You do not want to win an argument. You want to win.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

230. “You want failures to be small and informational. Silicon Valley does very well. It knows how to use failure as a tool for improvement.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

231. “Further, we are victims to a new disease, called in this book neomania, that makes us build Black Swan–vulnerable systems – “progress.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

232. “It certainly takes bravery to remain skeptical; it takes inordinate courage to introspect, to confront oneself, to accept one’s limitations – Scientists are seeing more and more evidence that we are specifically designed by mother nature to fool ourselves.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

233. “Too much success is the enemy, too much failure is demoralizing.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

234. “Because what matters in life isn’t how frequently one is “right” about outcomes, but how much one makes when one is right. Being wrong, when it is not costly, doesn’t count – in a way that’s similar to trial-and-error mechanisms of research.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

235. “The author cites researcher David Howard’s idea of post-traumatic growth. Howard contends that some individuals faced with a traumatic event actually develop new strength.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

236. “We are social animals; hell is other people.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

237. “My dream – the solution – is that we would have a National Entrepreneur Day, with the following message: Most of you will fail, disrespected, impoverished, but we are grateful for the risks you are taking and the sacrifices you are making for the sake of the economic growth of the planet and pulling others out of poverty. You are at the source of our antifragility. Our nation thanks you.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

238. “Economics is not a science and should not be there to advise policy.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

239. “Organisms need, to use the metaphor of Marcus Aurelius, to turn obstacles into fuel – just as fire does.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

240. “We didn’t get where we are thanks to the sissy notion of resilience.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

241. “And entrepreneurship is a risky and heroic activity, necessary for growth or even the mere survival of the economy.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

242. “When you don’t have debt you don’t care about your reputation in economics circles – and somehow it is only when you don’t care about your reputation that you tend to have a good one. Just.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

243. “Information is antifragile; it feeds more on attempts to harm it than it does on efforts to promote it. For instance, many wreck their reputations merely by trying to defend them.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

244. “A saying by the brothers Geoff and Vince Graham summarizes the ludicrousness of scale-free political universalism. I am, at the Fed level, libertarian; at the state level, Republican; at the local level, Democrat; and at the family and friends level, a socialist.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

245. “You are rich if and only if money you refuse tastes better than money you accept.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

246. “What Erasmus called ingratitudo vulgi, the ingratitude of the masses, is increasing in the age of globalization and the Internet.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

247. “Doctors most commonly get mixed up between absence of evidence and evidence of abense.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

248. “He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once. And someone who has made plenty of errors-though never the same error more than once-is more reliable than someone who has never made any.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

249. “Daily news and sugar confuse our system in the same manner.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

250. “Missing a train is only painful if you run after it.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb