Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes - Page 9

Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market alow you to put there.

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

If I could predict what my day would exactly look like, I would feel a little bit dead.

Writing is the art of repeating oneself without anyone noticing.

I disagree with the followers of Marx and those of Adam Smith: the reason free markets work is because they allow people to be lucky, thanks to aggressive trial and error, not by giving rewards or "incentives" for skill.

Work hard, not in grunt work, but in chasing such opportunities and maximizing exposure to them. This makes living in big cities invaluable because you increase the odds of serendipitous encounters-you gain exposure to the envelope of serendipity.

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

In politics we face the choice between warmongering, nation-state loving, big-business agents on one hand; and risk-blind, top-down, epistemic arrogant big servants of large employers on the other. But we have a choice.

People work out, they stress their body, and their body gets stronger from stress.

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.

This is the central illusion in life: that randomness is a risk, that it is a bad thing.

Most so-called writers keep writing and writing with the hope, some day, to find something to say.

I've debated many economists who claim to specialize in risk and probability: when one takes them slightly outside their narrow focus, but within the discipline of probability, they fall apart, with the disconsolate face of a gym rat in front of a gangster hit man.

Democracies can't handle austerity measures very well.

My major hobby is teasing people who take themselves and the quality of their knowledge too seriously and those who don't have the guts to sometimes say: I don't know.

A good rule of thumb is as follows: If the numbers come from somebody wearing a tie (Wall Street economist or analyst, industry public relations department, captive think tank academic and so on), you ought to be very skeptical. By design messages from these people are intended to move markets, move merchandise and/or move public policy and are not a comment on the state of the physical universe.

It is remarkable how fast and how effectively you can construct a nationality with a flag , a few speeches, and a national anthem; to this day I avoid the label "Lebanese," preferring the less restrictive "Levantine" designation.

Decomposition, for most, starts when they leave the free, social, and uncorrupted college life for the solitary confinement of professions and nuclear families.

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

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

Financial institutions have been merging into a smaller number of very large banks. Almost all banks are interrelated. So the financial ecology is swelling into gigantic, incestuous, bureaucratic banks-when one fails, they all fall. We have moved from a diversified ecology of small banks, with varied lending policies, to a more homogeneous framework of firms that all resemble one another. True, we now have fewer failures, but when they occur... I shiver at the thought.

We learn the most from fools ... yet we pay them back with the worst ingratitude.

What organized dating sites fail to understand is that the people are far more interesting in what they don't say about themselves.

We tend to use knowledge as therapy.