Top 500 Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “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

302. “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

303. “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

304. “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

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

307. “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

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

310. “People who are bred, selected, and compensated to find complicated solutions do not have an incentive to implement simplified ones.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

311. “Mild success can be explainable by skills and labor. Wild success is attributable to variance.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

313. “This is hard to accept in the age of the Internet. It has been very hard for me to explain that the more data you get, the less you know what’s going on, and the more iatrogenics you will cause. People are still under the illusion that “science” means more data.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

314. “Mediocristan is where we must endure the tyranny of the collective, the routine, the obvious, and the predicted; Extremistan is where we are subjected to the tyranny of the singular, the accidental, the unseen, and the unpredicted.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

316. “Since procrastination is a message from our natural willpower via low motivation, the cure is changing the environment, or one’s profession, by selecting one in which one does not have to fight one’s impulses. Few can grasp the logical consequence that, instead, one should lead a life in which procrastination is good, as a naturalistic-risk-based form of decision making.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

317. “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

318. “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

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

320. “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

321. “Clearly, an open mind is a necessity when dealing with randomness. Popper believed that any idea of Utopia is necessarily closed owing to the fact that it chokes its own refutations. The simple notion of a good model for society that cannot be left open for falsification is totalitarian. I learned from Popper, in addition to the difference between an open and a closed society, that between an open and a closed mind.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

322. “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

323. “The main idea behind complex systems is that the ensemble behaves in ways not predicted by its components.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

324. “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

325. “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

326. “Further, my characterization of a loser is someone who, after making a mistake, doesn’t introspect, doesn’t exploit it, feels embarrassed and defensive rather than enriched with a new piece of information, and tries to explain why he made the mistake rather than moving on. These types often consider themselves the “victims” of some large plot, a bad boss, or bad weather.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

327. “I am also realizing the nonlinear effect behind success in anything: It is better to have a handful of enthusiastic advocates than hordes of people who appreciate your work – better to be loved by a dozen than liked by the hundreds. This applies to the sales of books, the spread of ideas, and success in general and runs counter to conventional logic. The information age is worsening this effect.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

328. “This is the central illusion in life: that randomness is risky, that it is a bad thing – and that eliminating randomness is done by eliminating randomness.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

329. “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

330. “If the student is smart, the teacher takes the credit.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

331. “Learn to read history, get all the knowledge you can, do not frown on the anecdote, but do not draw any causal links, do not try to reverse engineer too much – but if you do, do not make big scientific claims.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

332. “We favor the sensational and the extremely visible. This affects the way we judge heroes. There is little room in our consciousness for heroes who do not deliver visible results – or those heroes who focus on process rather than results.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

334. “People feel deep anxiety finding out that someone they thought was stupid is actually more intelligent than they are.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

335. “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

336. “The irony of the process of thought control: the more energy you put into trying to control your ideas and what you think about, the more your ideas end up controlling you.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

337. “The problem is that our ideas are sticky: once we produce a theory, we are not likely to change our minds...”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

338. “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

339. “Don’t complain too loud about wrongs done you; you may give ideas to your less imaginative enemies.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

340. “You can define a free person precisely as someone whose fate is not centrally or directly dependent on peer assessment.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

341. “We flipped a coin to see who was going to pay for the meal. I lost and paid. He was about to thank me when he abruptly stopped and said that he paid for half of it probabilistically.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

342. “To understand the future, you do not need technoautistic jargon, obsession with “killer apps,” these sort of things. You just need the following: some respect for the past, some curiosity about the historical record, a hunger for the wisdom of the elders, and a grasp of the notion of “heuristics,” these often unwritten rules of thumb that are so determining of survival. In other words, you will be forced to give weight to things that have been around, things that have survived.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

343. “Engineers and tinkerers develop things while history books are written by academics; we will have to refine historical interpretations of growth, innovation, and many such things.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

344. “Self-contradiction is made culturally to be shameful, a matter that can prove disastrous in science.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

345. “Never hire an academic unless his function is to partake of the rituals of writing papers or taking exams.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

346. “You can tell how poor someone feels by the number of times he references “money” in his conversation.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

347. “The best way to verify that you are alive is by checking if you like variations. Remember that food would not have a taste if it weren’t for hunger; results are meaningless without effort, joy without sadness, convictions without uncertainty, and an ethical life isn’t so when stripped of personal risks.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

348. “The story of the wheel also illustrates the point of this chapter: both governments and universities have done very, very little for innovation and discovery, precisely because, in addition to their blinding rationalism, they look for the complicated, the lurid, the newsworthy, the narrated, the scientistic, and the grandiose, rarely for the wheel on the suitcase. Simplicity, I realized, does not lead to laurels.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

349. “A word on the display of emotions. Almost no one can conceal his emotions. Behavioral scientists believe that one of the main reasons why people become leaders is not from what skills they seem to possess, but rather from what extremely superficial impression they make on others through hardly perceptible physical signals – what we call today “charisma,” for example. The biology of the phenomenon is now well studied under the subject heading “social emotions.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

350. “To be genuinely empirical is to reflect reality as faithfully as possible; to be honorable implies not fearing the appearance and consequences of being outlandish.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb