Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes

Intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant.

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 three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.

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

Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love.

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

They are born, put in a box; they go home to live in a box; they study by ticking boxes; they go to what is called "work" in a box, where they sit in their cubicle box; they drive to the grocery store in a box to buy food in a box; they talk about thinking "outside the box"; and when they die they are put in a box.

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

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

Muscles without strength, friendship without trust, opinion without risk, change without aesthetics, age without values, food without nourishment, power without fairness, facts without rigor, degrees without erudition, militarism without fortitude, progress without civilization, complication without depth, fluency without content; these are the sins to remember.

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.

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

Only the autodidacts are free.

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.

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

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

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.

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 world we live in is vastly different from the world we think we live in.

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

The more data we have, the more likely we are to drown in it.

To bankrupt a fool, give him information.

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

Weak men act to satisfy their needs, stronger men their duties.

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