Top 500 Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “A mistake is not something to be determined after the fact, but in the light of the information until that point.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

253. “A system with skin-in-the-game requirements holds together through the notion of a sacrifice in order to protect the collective or entities higher in the hierarchy that are required to survive.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

254. “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

255. “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

256. “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

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

259. “To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week’s newspapers.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

261. “The difference between slaves in Roman and Ottoman days and today’s employees is that slaves did not need to flatter their boss.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

262. “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

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

264. “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

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

269. “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

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

274. “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

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

277. “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

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

281. “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

282. “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

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

286. “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

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

289. “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

290. “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

291. “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

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

295. “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

296. “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

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

298. “Fragility is the quality of things that are vulnerable to volatility.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

299. “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

300. “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