Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes - Page 3

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

If there is something in nature you don't understand, odds are it makes sense in a deeper way that is beyond your understanding. So there is a logic to natural things that is much superior to our own. Just as there is a dichotomy in law: 'innocent until proven guilty' as opposed to 'guilty until proven innocent', let me express my rule as follows: what Mother Nature does is rigorous until proven otherwise; what humans and science do is flawed until proven otherwise.

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

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.

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.

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

The difference between slaves in Roman and Ottoman days and today's employees is that slaves did not need to flatter their boss.

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

Things always become obvious after the fact

The person you are most afraid to contradict is yourself.

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

...maximize the serendipity around you.

Anything that provides you with very, very stable income, very stable conditions, maybe generally stable, that often, it masks real risks, risks of blow-ups.

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

The problem of knowledge is that there are many more books on birds written by ornithologists than books on birds written by birds and books on ornithologists written by birds

Never take advice from someone wearing a tie.

Love without sacrifice is like theft

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

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

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

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.

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

Greatness starts with the replacement of hatred with polite disdain.

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

When you develop your opinions on the basis of weak evidence, you will have difficulty interpreting subsequent information that contradicts these opinions, even if this new information is obviously more accurate.