Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes - Page 4

We know from chaos theory that even if you had a perfect model of the world, you'd need infinite precision in order to predict future events. With sociopolitical or economic phenomena, we don't have anything like that.

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

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.

Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility; it results from some ecological or naturalistic wisdom, and is not always bad - at an existential level, it is my body rebelling against its entrapment. It is my soul fighting the Procrustean bed of modernity.

In science you need to understand the world; in business you need others to misunderstand it.

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

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

There is a certain category of fool-the overeducated, the academic, the journalist, the newspaper reader, the mechanistic scientist, the pseudo-empiricist, those endowed with what I call epistemic arrogance, this wonderful ability to discount what they did not see, the unobserved.

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

What America does best is produce the ability to accept failure.

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

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

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

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

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

We should reward people, not ridicule them, for thinking the impossible.

A mistake is not something to be determined after the fact, but in the light of the information until that point.

Daily news and sugar confuse our system in the same manner.

Ideas come and go, stories stay.

The number of managers with great track records in a given market depends far more on the number of people who started in the investment business (in place of going to dental school), rather than on their ability to produce profits.

By setting oneself totally free of constraints, free of thoughts, free of this debilitating activity called work, free of efforts, elements hidden in the texture of reality start staring at you; then mysteries that you never thought existed emerge in front of your eyes.

What I learned on my own I still remember

It is my great hope someday, to see science and decision makers rediscover what the ancients have always known. Namely that our highest currency is respect.

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

Meditation is a way to be narcissistic without hurting anyone