Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes

You get pseudo-order when you seek order; you only get a measure of order and control when you embrace randomness.

The imagination of the genius vastly surpasses his intellect; the intellect of the academic vastly surpasses his imagination

The inability to predict outliers implies the inability to predict the course of history

To bankrupt a fool, give him information.

Failure saves lives. In the airline industry, every time a plane crashes the probability of the next crash is lowered by that.

The psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has a simple heuristic. Never ask the doctor what you should do. Ask him what he would do if he were in your place. You would be surprised at the difference

The curious mind embraces science; the gifted and sensitive, the arts; the practical, business; the leftover becomes an economist

You will get the most attention from those who hate you. No friend, no admirer and no partner will flatter you with as much curiosity.

Never think that lack of variability is stability. Don't confuse lack of volatility with stability, ever.

Don't aim to be perfect! Aim to be antifragile

The fastest way to become rich is to socialize with the poor; the fastest way to become poor is to socialize with the rich.

The person you are most afraid to contradict is yourself.

If you want to annoy a poet, explain his poetry.

The fragile wants tranquility, the antifragile grows from disorder, and the robust doesn't care too much.

Randomness works well in search sometimes better than humans.

Don't ask the barber whether you need a haircut, and don't ask an academic if what he does is relevant.

Remember that you are a Black Swan.

The same past data can confirm a theory and its exact opposite! If you survive until tomorrow, it could mean that either a) you are more likely to be immortal or b) that you are closer to death.

Suckers try to win arguments, nonsuckers try to win.

I always remind myself that what one observes is at best a combination of variance and returns, not just returns.

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.

A man without a heroic bent starts dying at the age of thirty.

You find peace by coming to terms with what you don't know.

You don't become completely free by just avoiding being a slave; you also need to avoid becoming a master.

The only valid political system is one that can handle an imbecile in power without suffering from it

Heroes are heroes because they are heroic in behavior, not because they won or lost.

Those who do not think that employment is systemic slavery are either blind or employed.

The sucker's trap is when you focus on what you know and what others don't know, rather than the reverse.

The classical man's worst fear was inglorious death; the modern man's worst fear is just death

An option hides where we don't want it to hide.

Stoicism is about the *domestication* of emotions, not their elimination.

Paul Krugman is a danger to society!

I remind myself of Einstein's remark that common sense is nothing but a collection of misconceptions acquired by age 18.

Things always become obvious after the fact

Suckers think that you cure greed with money, addiction with substances, expert problems with experts, banking with bankers, economics with economists, and debt crises with debt spending

Modernity: we created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur

You will be civilized on the day you can spend a long period doing nothing, learning nothing, and improving nothing, without feeling the slightest amount of guilt.

The weak shows his strength and hides his weaknesses; the magnificent exhibits his weaknesses like ornaments.

Simplicity is not so simple to attain.

What fools call "wasting time" is most often the best investment.

We tend to treat our knowledge as personal property to be protected and defended. It is an ornament that allows us to rise in the pecking order. [...] We take what we know a little too seriously.

When an investor focuses on short-term investments, he or she is observing the variability of the portfolio, not the returns - in short, being fooled by randomness.

Experience is devoid of the cherry-picking that we find in studies.

Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.

For the robust, an error is information.

This is the central illusion in life: that randomness is a risk, that it is a bad thing.

The fool generalizes the particular; the nerd particularizes the general; some do both; and the wise does neither

It might be useful to be able to predict war. But tension does not necessarily lead to war, but often to peace and to denouement.

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

Injecting some confusion stabilizes the system.