Top 500 Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes (2023 Update)
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251. “The rationalist imagines an imbecile-free society; the empiricist and imbecile-proof one, or even better, a rationalist-proof one.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

253. “Another definition of modernity: conversations can be more and more completely reconstructed with clips from other conversations taking place at the same time on the planet.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

256. “To understand how something works, figure out how to break it.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

258. “When some systems are stuck in a dangerous impasse, randomness and only randomness can unlock them and set them free.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

259. “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

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

261. “The government-sponsored institution Fannie Mae, when I look at its risks, seems to be sitting on a barrel of dynamite, vulnerable to the slightest hiccup. But not to worry: their large staff of scientists deemed these events “unlikely.””

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

262. “In science you need to understand the world; in business you need others to misunderstand it.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

263. “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

264. “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

265. “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

266. “As Ennius wrote, “The good is mostly in the absence of bad”; Nimium boni est, cui nihil est mali.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

267. “Restaurants get you in with food to sell you liquor; religions get you in with belief to sell you rules.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

268. “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

269. “People focus on role models; it is more effective to find antimodels – people you don’t want to resemble when you grow up.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

271. “I suspect that they put Socrates to death because there is something terribly unattractive, alienating, and nonhuman in thinking with too much clarity.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

273. “An option hides where we don’t want it to hide.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

275. “English “manners” were imposed on the middle class as a way of domesticating them, along with instilling in them the fear of breaking rules and violating social norms.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

276. “There is no intermediate state between ice and water but there is one between life and death: employment.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

277. “If your private life conflicts with your intellectual opinion, it cancels your intellectual ideas, not your private life.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

278. “Our brain is not cut out for nonlinearities. People think that if, say, two variables are causally linked, then a steady input in one variable should always yield a result in the other one. Our emotional apparatus is designed for linear causality. For.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

280. “If you hear a “prominent” economist using the word ‘equilibrium,’ or ‘normal distribution,’ do not argue with him; just ignore him, or try to put a rat down his shirt.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

281. “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

282. “You know you have influence when people start noticing your absence more than the presence of others.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

283. “A mathematician starts with a problem and creates a solution; a consultant starts by offering a “solution” and creates a problem.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

284. “Success brings an asymmetry: you now have a lot more to lose than to gain. You are hence fragile.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

285. “Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market alow you to put there.”

— 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. “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

288. “The curse of modernity is that we are increasingly populated by a class of people who are better at explaining than understanding, or better at explaining than doing.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

289. “Further, being fooled by randomness is that in most circumstances fraught with a high degree of randomness, one cannot really tell if a successful person has skills, or if a person with skills will succeed – but we can pretty much predict the negative, that a person totally devoid of skills will eventually fail.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

290. “The IYI subscribes to The New Yorker, a journal designed so philistines can learn to fake a conversation about evolution, neurosomething, cognitive biases, and quantum mechanics.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

291. “The true hero in the Black Swan world is someone who prevents a calamity and, naturally, because the calamity did not take place, does not get recognition – or a bonus – for it. I will be taking the concept deeper in Book VII, on ethics, about the unfairness of a bonus system and how such unfairness is magnified by complexity.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

292. “A washing machine needs constant maintenance. It doesn’t want any harm. It wants tranquility, and you need someone to – you’re not going to harm it by continuously monitoring it and adjusting it.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

293. “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

294. “If you take risks and face your fate with dignity, there is nothing you can do that makes you small; if you don’t take risks, there is nothing you can do that makes you grand, nothing.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

295. “Technothinkers tend to have an “engineering mind” – to put it less politely, they have autistic tendencies. While they don’t usually wear ties, these types tend, of course, to exhibit all the textbook characteristics of nerdiness – mostly lack of charm, interest in objects instead of persons, causing them to neglect their looks. They love precision at the expense of applicability. And they typically share an absence of literary culture.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

296. “The worst side effect of wealth is the social associations it forces on its victims, as people with big houses end up socializing with other people with big houses.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

297. “Writers are remembered for their best work, politicians for their worst mistakes, and businessmen are almost never remembered.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

298. “Banking is a very treacherous business because you don’t realize it is risky until it is too late. It is like calm waters that deliver huge storms.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

299. “I’ve debated many economists who claim to specialize in risk and probability: when one takes them slightly outside their narrow focus, but within the discipline of probability, they fall apart, with the disconsolate face of a gym rat in front of a gangster hit man.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

300. “I have the fondest memories of time spent in places called ugly, the most boring ones of places called scenic.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb