Top 500 Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “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

352. “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

353. “This high-yield market resembles a nap on a railway track.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

354. “If you want to get an idea of a friend’s temperament, ethics, and personal elegance, you need to look at him under the tests of severe circumstances, not under the regular rosy glow of daily life.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

355. “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

356. “Characteristically, Samuelson intimidated those who questioned his techniques with the statement “Those who can, do science, others do methodology.” If you knew math, you could “do science.” This is reminiscent of psychoanalysts who silence their critics by accusing them of having trouble with their fathers.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

358. “The best way to prove the arbitrary character of these categories, and the contagion effect they produce, is to remember how frequently these clusters reverse in history. Today’s alliance between Christian fundamentalists and the Israeli lobby would certainly seem puzzling to a nineteenth-century intellectual – Christians used to be anti-Semites and Moslems were the protectors of the Jews, whom they preferred to Christians. Libertarians used to be left-wing. What.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

359. “Modernity’s double punishment is to make us both age prematurely and live longer.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

360. “Let us call Mithridatization the result of an exposure to a small dose of a substance that, over time, makes one immune to additional, larger quantities of it. It is the sort of approach used in vaccination and allergy medicine. It is not quite antifragility, still at the more modest level of robustness, but we are on our way. And we already have a hint that perhaps being deprived of poison makes us fragile and that the road to robustification starts with a modicum of harm.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

361. “It was calculated that actors who win an Oscar tend to live on average about five years longer than their peers who don’t.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

362. “The payoff of a human venture is, in general, inversely proportional to what it is expected to be.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

363. “Most people fear being without audiovisual stimulation because they are too repetitive when they think and imagine things on their own.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

364. “Like tormenting love, some thoughts are so antifragile that you feed them by trying to get rid of them, turning them into obsessions. Psychologists have shown 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

365. “It is no secret that large corporations prefer people with families; those with downside risk are easier to own, particularly when they are choking under a large mortgage.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

366. “I don’t know anyone on Wall Street who goes to work every day thinking of anything but how to increase their bonus.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

367. “When people get rich, they shed their skin-in-the-game-driven experiential mechanism. They lose control of their preferences, substituting constructed preferences for their own, complicating their lives unnecessarily, triggering their own misery.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

368. “So let us call here the teleological fallacy the illusion that you know exactly where you are going, and that you knew exactly where you were going in the past, and that others have succeeded in the past by knowing where they were going.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

369. “This, perhaps is true self-confidence: the ability to look at the world without the need to find signs that stroke one’s ego.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

370. “Anything organic requires some dose of variability so it can adapt all the time, and fixing things is not a good idea.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

371. “Complex systems are full of interdependencies – hard to detect – and nonlinear responses.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

372. “People often need to suspend their self-promotion, and have someone in their lives they do not need to impress. This explains dog ownership.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

373. “Rationalism crashes in the tails.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

374. “It is not what you are telling people, it is how you are saying it.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

375. “No, businessmen as risk takers are not subjected to the judgment of other businessmen, only to that of their personal accountant.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

376. “The chief ethical rule is the following: Thou shalt not have antifragility at the expense of the fragility of others.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

377. “Most so-called writers keep writing and writing with the hope, some day, to find something to say.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

378. “You can tell how uninteresting a person is by asking him whom he finds interesting.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

379. “Living on our planet, today, requires a lot more imagination than we are made to have. We lack imagination and repress it in others.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

380. “It is much harder to become independent if you are wealthy than to become wealthy if you are independent.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

381. “Nobody reads the disclosures that roll down your computer screen. You click ‘I agree’ but you don’t know what you’re agreeing to.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

382. “Further, the random element in trial and error is not quite random, if it is carried out rationally, using error as a source of information. If every trial provides you with information about what does not work, you start zooming in on a solution – so every attempt becomes more valuable, more like an expense than an error. And of course you make discoveries along the way.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

383. “The Web is an unhealthy place for someone hungry for attention.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

384. “Let me warn against misinterpreting the message here. The argument is not against the notion of intervention; in fact I showed above that I am equally worried about underintervention when it is truly necessary. I am just warning against naive intervention and lack of awareness and acceptance of harm done by it.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

385. “It seems that it is the most unsuccessful people who give the most advice, particularly for writing and financial matters.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

386. “Most of what they call humility is successfully disguised arrogance.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

387. “Sometimes people ask you a question with their eyes begging you to not tell them the truth.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

388. “Our sophistication continuously puts us ahead of ourselves, creating things we are less and less capable of understanding.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

389. “Some people are only funny when they try to be serious.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

390. “When she shouts that what you did was unforgivable, she has already started to forgive you.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

391. “Usually, what we call a “good listener” is someone with skillfully polished indifference.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

392. “You can replace lies with truth; but myth is only displaced with a narrative.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

393. “People overvalue their knowledge and underestimate the probability of their being wrong.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

394. “The world as a whole has never been richer, and it has never been more heavily in debt, living off borrowed money. The record shows that, for society, the richer we become, the harder it get to live within our means. Abundance is harder for us to handle than scarcity.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

395. “Given the unattainability of perfect robustness, we need a mechanism by which the system regenerates itself continuously by using, rather than suffering from, random events, unpredictable shocks, stressors, and volatility.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

396. “Most feed their obsessions by trying to get rid of them.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

397. “It’s not a good idea to take a forecast from someone wearing a tie. If possible, tease people who take themselves and their knowledge too seriously.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

398. “Janet Yellen at the FED is equivalent to having a biology schoolteacher who has never seen blood perform brain surgery.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

399. “Just as being nice to the arrogant is no better than being arrogant toward the nice, being accommodating toward anyone committing a nefarious action condones it.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

400. “If you want to accelerate someone’s death, give him a personal doctor. I don’t mean provide him with a bad doctor: just pay for him to choose his own. Any doctor will do. This may be the only possible way to murder someone while staying squarely within the law. We can see from the tonsillectomy story that access to data increases intervention, causing us to behave like the neurotic fellow.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb