Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes

Doctors most commonly get mixed up between absence of evidence and evidence of abense

A Stoic is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into transformation, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking.

For many people, commuting is the worst part of the day, and policies that can make commuting shorter and more convenient would be a straightforward way to reduce minor but widespread suffering.

Decomposition, for most, starts when they leave the free, social, and uncorrupted college life for the solitary confinement of professions and nuclear families.

People used to wear ordinary clothes weekdays, and formal attire on Sunday. Today it is the exact reverse.

Democracies can't handle austerity measures very well.

Missing a train is only painful if you run after it! Likewise, not matching the idea of success others expect from you is only painful if that’s what you are seeking.

Love without sacrifice is like theft

Avoid losers. If you hear someone use the words 'impossible', 'never', 'too difficult' too often, drop him or her from your social network.

Someone bemoaned that there were so few women in economics. But there are also very few men in economics.

Someone who says "I am busy" is either declaring incompetence (and lack of control of his life) or trying to get rid of you.

Karl Marx, a visionary, figured out that you can control a slave much better by convincing him he is an employee.

Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg didn't finish college. Too much emphasis is placed on formal education - I told my children not to worry about their grades but to enjoy learning.

A competitive athlete is painful to look at; trying hard to become an animal rather than a man, he will never be as fast as a cheetah or as strong as an ox.

Umberto Eco is the owner of a large personal library of almost 30,000 books that he has not read. [To him] read books are far less valuable than unread ones.

Your reputation is harmed the most by what you say to defend it.

Social science means inventing a certain brand of human we can understand.

Don't cross a river if it is four feet deep on average.

Answer e-mails from junior people before more senior ones. Junior people have further to go and tend to remember who slighted them.

The traits I respect are erudition and the courage to stand up when half-men are afraid for their reputation. Any idiot can be intelligent.

Intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant.

They think that intelligence is about noticing things are relevant (detecting patterns); in a complex world, intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant (avoiding false patterns)

The central idea in The Black Swan is that: rare events cannot be estimated from empirical observation since they are rare.

Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love.

If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud.

Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW. You need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel or a private jet.

People are much less interested in what you are trying to show them than what you are trying to hide.

The difference between technology and slavery is that slaves are fully aware that they are not free

Never, never, never think - that's one lesson you should have in life. Never think that lack of variability is stability.

Only in recent history has "working hard" signaled pride rather than shame for lack of talent, finesse and, mostly, sprezzatura .

People focus on role models; it is more effective to find antimodels - people you don't want to resemble when you grow up

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

It is a sign of weakness to avoid showing signs of weakness.

You exist if and only if you are free to do things without a visible objective, with no justification and, above all, outside the dictatorship of someone else's narrative.

What I learned on my own I still remember

...maximize the serendipity around you.

Learn to fail with pride - and do so fast and cleanly. Maximise trial and error - by mastering the error part.

Wittgenstein's ruler: Unless you have confidence in the ruler's reliability, if you use a ruler to measure a table you may also be using the table to measure the ruler.

Comfort makes you weaker. We need some variability, some stressors. Not too much, but just enough.

To succeed in life requires a total inability to do anything that makes you uncomfortable when you look at yourself in the mirror.

Go to parties. You can't even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.

This is the tragedy of modernity: as with neurotically overprotective parents, those trying to help are often hurting us the most.

Prediction, not narration, is the real test of our understanding of the world.

At no point in history have so many non-risk-takers, that is, those with no personal exposure, exerted so much control.

You have a real life if and only if you do not compete with anyone in any of your pursuits.

Being an entrepreneur is an existential, not just a financial thing.

An ad hominem attack against an individual, not against an idea, is highly flattering. It indicates that the person does not have anything intelligent to say about your message.

Meditation is a way to be narcissistic without hurting anyone

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

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