Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes - Page 7

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

The fragile wants tranquility, the antifragile grows from disorder, and the robust doesn't care too much.

We glorify those who left their names in history books at the expense of those contributors about whom our books are silent. We humans are not just a superficial race - we are a very unfair one.

Banks have never made money in the history of banking, losing the equivalent of all their past profits periodically - while bankers strike it rich.

If you sat with a pencil and jotted down all the decisions you've taken in the past week, or, if you could, over your lifetime, you would realize that almost all of them have had asymmetric payoff, with one side carrying a larger consequence than the other. You decide principally based on fragility, not probability. Or to rephrase, You decide principally based on fragility, not so much on True/False.

What fools call "wasting time" is most often the best investment.

The fool generalizes the particular; the nerd particularizes the general; some do both; and the wise does neither

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

When some systems are stuck in a dangerous impasse, randomness and only randomness can unlock them and set them free.

Much of aging comes from a misunderstanding of the effect of comfort.

An erudite is someone who displays less than he knows; a journalist or consultant the opposite.

If one puts an infinite number of monkeys in front of typewriters, and lets them clap away, there is a certainty that one of them will come out with an exact version of the 'Iliad.'

Suckers think that you cure greed with money, addiction with substances, expert problems with experts, banking with bankers, economics with economists, and debt crises with debt spending

When we want to do something while unconsciously certain to fail, we seek advice so we can blame someone else for the failure.

If humans fight the last war, nature fights the next one.

A prophet is not someone with special visions, just someone blind to most of what others see

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.

Rank beliefs not according to their plausibility but by the harm they may cause.

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.

To become a philosopher, start by walking very slowly.

The opposite of fragile is something that gains from disorder.

The classical man's worst fear was inglorious death; the modern man's worst fear is just death

It might be useful to be able to predict war. But tension does not necessarily lead to war, but often to peace and to denouement.

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.

Modernity has replaced ethics with legalese, and the law can be gamed with a good lawyer.