Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes

The opposite of manliness isn't cowardice; it's technology.

I'm a capitalist but one who is smallist and localist, and who favours businesses where owners are still in charge.

Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness.

My biggest problem with modernity may lie in the growing separation of the ethical and the legal

They will envy you for your success, your wealth, for your intelligence, for your looks, for your status - but rarely for your wisdom.

Globalization has created this interlocking fragility. At no time in the history of the universe has the cancellation of a Christmas order in New York meant layoffs in China.

Restaurants get you in with food to sell you liquor; religions get you in with belief to sell you rules.

Debt is a mistake between lender and borrower, and both should suffer.

There are systems that use failure as fuel for improvement, where the cost of failure is small.

If you don't feel that you haven't read enough, you haven't read enough.

Greatness starts with the replacement of hatred with polite disdain.

The best test of whether someone is extremely stupid (or extremely wise) is whether financial and political news makes sense to him.

There are secrets to our world that only practice can reveal, and no opinion or analysis will ever capture in full.

Older people are most beautiful when they have what is lacking in the young: poise, erudition, wisdom, phronesis, and this post-heroic absence of agitation.

If my detractors knew me better they would hate me even more.

To become a philosopher, start by walking very slowly.

I hated school because I liked to daydream and the system tried to stop me from that.

To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week's newspapers.

Mental clarity is the child of courage, not the other way around.

We tend to use knowledge as therapy.

Probability is not about the odds, but about the belief in the existence of an alternative outcome, cause, or motive.

[A] theory is a very dangerous thing to have.

You are rich if and only if money you refuse tastes better than money you accept.

My nightmare scenario is that the government saves Citibank once again, as well as the other banks, and business resumes as usual. Then, the next time the system breaks, it breaks much, much bigger.

Much of modern life is preventable chronic stress injury.

Maximum of an average is necessarily less volatile than the average maximum

Poverty is clearly one source of emotional suffering, but there are others, like loneliness.

If you let markets - in general, my belief is that if you let markets give you information, they'll give you the information rather than artificially prop up everything.

true humility is when you can surprise yourself more than others; the rest is either shyness or good marketing

It's harder to say 'no' when you really mean it.

A system, artificially stabilized, and of course you have hidden risks under the surface, and you don't know where the risks are.

Most people are sceptical about the wrong things and gullible about the wrong things.

We should ban banks from risk-taking because society is going to pay the price.

Asking science to explain life and vital matters is equivalent to asking a grammarian to explain poetry.

When you ask people, 'What's the opposite of fragile?,' they tend to say robust, resilient, adaptable, solid, strong. That's not it. The opposite of fragile is something that gains from disorder.

It does not matter how frequently something succeeds if failure is too costly to bear.

It takes extraordinary wisdom and self-control to accept that many things have a logic we do not understand that is smarter than our own.

In economic life and history more generally, just about everything of consequence comes from black swans; ordinary events have paltry effects in the long term.

For the classics philosophical insight was the product of a life of leisure; for me a life of leisure is the product of philosophical insight.

We should probably stop trading derivatives, anything more complex than regular options ... I am an options trader, and I don't understand options. How do you want a regulator to understand them?

The opposite of fragile is something that gains from disorder.

We cannot truly plan, because we do not understand the future-but this is not necessarily a bad news. We could plan while bearing in mind such limitations. It just takes guts.

Redundancy is ambiguous because it seems like a waste if nothing unusual happens. Except that something unusual happens-usually .

Make sure that you are in a situation where the constant mistakes are small and can be used for something.

Information is antifragile; it feeds more on attempts to harm it than it does on efforts to promote it.

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

When you beat up someone physically, you get excercise and stress relief; when you assault him verbally on the Internet, you just harm yourself.

The best way to learn a language may be an episode of jail in a foreign country.

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

We didn't get where we are thanks to the sissy notion of resilience.