Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes
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351. “Debt is a mistake between lender and borrower, and both should suffer.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

353. “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

354. “One Thousand And One Days, or How Not to Be a Sucker.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

357. “Ex cura theoria nascitur.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

358. “All of technology, really, is about maximizing free options.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

359. “There is a Yiddish saying: “If I am going to be forced to eat pork, it better be of the best kind.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

360. “Imagine a speck of dust next to a planet a billion times the size of the earth. The speck of dust represents the odds in favor of your being born; the huge planet would be the odds against it. So stop sweating the small stuff. Don’t be like the ingrate who got a castle as a present and worried about the mildew in the bathroom. Stop looking the gift horse in the mouth – remember that you are a Black Swan.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

361. “The tragedy of virtue is that the more obvious, boring, unoriginal, and sermonizing the proverb, the harder it is to implement.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

362. “No matter how sophisticated our choices, how good we are at dominating the odds, randomness will have the last word.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

363. “In their intense meditation the hidden sound of things approaching reaches them and they listen reverently while in the street outside the people hear nothing at all.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

365. “The problem of knowledge is that there are many more books on birds written by ornithologists than books on birds written by birds and books on ornithologists written by birds.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

366. “A complex system, contrary to what people believe, does not require complicated systems and regulations and intricate policies.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

367. “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

368. “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

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

370. “Probability is not a mere computation of odds on the dice or more complicated variants; it is the acceptance of the lack of certainty in our knowledge and the development of methods for dealing with our ignorance.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

371. “The left holds that because markets are stupid models should be smart; the right believes that because models are stupid markets should be smart. Alas, it never hit both sides that both markets and models are very stupid.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

372. “It is the system and its fragility, not events, that must be studied – what physicists call “percolation theory,” in which the properties of the randomness of the terrain are studied, rather than those of a single element of the terrain.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

373. “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

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

375. “Luck is the grand equalizer.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

376. “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

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

378. “Unless you are perfectly narcissistic and psychopathic – even then – your worst-case scenario is never limited to the loss of only your life.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

379. “I want them poor and they deserve to be poor. You can’t have capitalism without punishment.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

380. “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

381. “A king, angry at his son, swore that he would crush him with a large stone.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

382. “If my brain can ttell the difference between noise and signal, my heart cannot.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

383. “The world we live in is vastly different from the world we think we live in.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

384. “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

385. “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

386. “But the worst touristification is the life we moderns have to lead in captivity, during our leisure hours: Friday night opera, scheduled parties, scheduled laughs. Again, golden jail. This “goal-driven” attitude hurts deeply inside my existential self.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

387. “When you look at the past, the past will always be deterministic, since only one single observation took place.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

388. “Because the bell curve ignores large deviations, cannot handle them, yet makes us confident that we have tamed uncertainty. Its.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

389. “In a textbook case of naive empiricism, the author also looked for traits these millionaires had in common and figured out that they shared a taste for risk taking. Clearly risk taking is necessary for large success – but it is also necessary for failure. Had the author done the same study on bankrupt citizens he would certainly have found a predilection for risk taking.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

391. “If your private actions do not generalize, then you cannot have general ideas.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

392. “We have been unconsciously exploiting antifragility in practical life and, consciously, rejecting it – particularly in intellectual life. The.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

393. “No person in a transaction should have certainty about the outcome while the other one has uncertainty.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

394. “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

395. “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

396. “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

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

398. “Remember the psychological discussions on asymmetries in the perception of skills in the previous chapter? We see flaws in others and not in ourselves. Once again we seem to be wonderful at self-deceit machines.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

399. “In practice, randomness is fundamentally incomplete information.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

400. “Randomness works well in search sometimes better than humans.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb