Top 500 Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “We are social animals; hell is other people.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

252. “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

253. “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

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

256. “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

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

259. “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

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

262. “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

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

264. “Religion isn’t so much about telling man that there is one God as about preventing man from thinking that he is God.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

265. “A mistake is not something to be determined after the fact, but in the light of the information until that point.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

266. “Mathematics is principally a tool to meditate, rather than to compute.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

267. “Many, like the great Roman statesman Cato the Censor, looked at comfort, almost any form of comfort, as a road to waste.1 He did not like it when we had it too easy, as he worried about the weakening of the will. And the softening he feared was not just at the personal level: an entire society can fall ill.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

268. “So just as Stoicism is the domestication, not the elimination, of emotions, so is the barbell a domestication, not the elimination, of uncertainty.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

269. “A turkey is fed for a thousand days by a butcher; every day confirms to its staff of analysts that butchers love turkeys “with increased statistical confidence.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

270. “There are designations, like “economist,” “prostitute,” or “consultant,” for which additional characterization doesn’t add information.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

271. “We ingest probiotics because we don’t eat enough “dirt” anymore.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

272. “If you need to listen to music while walking, don’t walk; and please don’t listen to music.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

273. “Anything one needs to market heavily is necessarily either an inferior product or an evil one. And it is highly unethical to portray something in a more favorable light than it actually is.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

274. “Life would be unbearably bland if we had no enemies on whom to waste efforts and energy.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

275. “Bureaucracy is a construction by which a person is conveniently separated from the consequences of his or her actions.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

276. “Life is a tightrope between two errors: generalizing the wrong particular and particularizing the wrong general.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

277. “What organized dating sites fail to understand is that the people are far more interesting in what they don’t say about themselves.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

278. “You stand above the rat race and the pecking order, not outside of it, if you do so by choice.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

279. “Every social association that is not face-to-face is injurious to your health.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

280. “Maximum of an average is necessarily less volatile than the average maximum.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

281. “Forecasting by bureaucrats tends to be used for anxiety relief rather than for adequate policy making.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

282. “Many people labor in life under the impression that they are doing something right, yet they may not show solid results for a long time. They need a capacity for continuously adjourned gratification to survive a steady diet of peer cruelty without becoming demoralized.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

283. “Not everything that happens happens for a reason, but everything that survives survives for a reason.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

284. “For the classics philosophical insight was the product of a life of leisure; for me a life of leisure is the product of philosophical insight.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

285. “The only article Lady Fortuna has no control over is your behavior. Good luck.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

286. “An honest person will never commit criminal acts, but a criminal will readily engage in legal acts.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

287. “A mathematician thinks in numbers, a lawyer in laws, and an idiot thinks in words.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

288. “Modernity needs to understand that being rich and becoming rich are not mathematically, personally, socially, and ethically the same thing.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

289. “We have this culture of financialization. People think they need to make money with their savings rather with their own business. So you end up with dentists who are more traders than dentists. A dentist should drill teeth and use whatever he does in the stock market for entertainment.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

290. “Categorizing is necessary for humans, but it becomes pathological when the category is seen as definitive, preventing people from considering the fuzziness of boundaries, let alone revising their categories.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

291. “Probability and expectation are not the same. Its probability and probability times the pay off.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

292. “I lift heavy weights and sprint, but I am so bad at it that I develop severe injuries.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

293. “The rationalist imagines an imbecile-free society; the empiricist and imbecile-proof one, or even better, a rationalist-proof one.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

294. “Mark Buchanan’s Ubiquity, Philip Ball’s Critical Mass, and Paul Ormerod’s Why Most Things Fail.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

295. “The book is the only medium left that hasn’t been corrupted by the profane.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

296. “The imagination of the genius vastly surpasses his intellect; the intellect of the academic vastly surpasses his imagination.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

297. “It is said that the best horses lose when they compete with slower ones, and win against better rivals. Undercompensation from the absence of a stressor, inverse hormesis, absence of challenge, degrades the best of the best. In Baudelaire’s poem, “The albatross’s giant wings prevent him from walking” – many do better in Calculus 103 than Calculus 101.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

298. “Some people do not know their own interest – just consider addicts, workaholics, people trapped in a bad relationship, people who support large government, the press, book reviewers, or respectable bureaucrats, all of whom for some mysterious reason act against their own interest.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

299. “Survival comes first, truth, understanding, and science later.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

300. “People do not realize that the media is paid to get your attention. For a journalist, silence rarely surpasses any word.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb