Nassim Nicholas Taleb quotes - page 3

The worst side effect of wealth is the social associations it forces on its victims, as people with big houses end up socializing with other people with big houses. (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)
Lucky fools do not bear the slightest suspicion that they may be lucky fools - by definition, they do not know that they belong to such a category. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Procrastination is the soul rebelling against entrapment. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
You have a real life if and only if you do not compete with anyone in any of your pursuits. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Cumulative errors depend largely on the big surprises, the big opportunities. Not only do economic, financial, and political predictors miss them, but they are quite ashamed to say anything outlandish to their clients - and yet events, it turns out, are almost always outlandish. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Don't cross a river if it is four feet deep on average. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Rank beliefs not according to their plausibility but by the harm they may cause. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
If humans fight the last war, nature fights the next one. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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. (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)
Simplicity is not so simple to attain. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
I always remind myself that what one observes is at best a combination of variance and returns, not just returns. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
When some systems are stuck in a dangerous impasse, randomness and only randomness can unlock them and set them free. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Mental clarity is the child of courage, not the other way around. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Using, as an excuse, others' failure of common sense is in itself a failure of common sense. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The same past data can confirm a theory and its exact opposite! If you survive until tomorrow, it could mean that either a) you are more likely to be immortal or b) that you are closer to death. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
People used to wear ordinary clothes weekdays, and formal attire on Sunday. Today it is the exact reverse. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Modernity needs to understand that being rich and becoming rich are not mathematically, personally, socially, and ethically the same thing. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Decomposition, for most, starts when they leave the free, social, and uncorrupted college life for the solitary confinement of professions and nuclear families. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
If I could predict what my day would exactly look like, I would feel a little bit dead. (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)
History is opaque. You see what comes out, not the script that produces events, [...] The generator of historical events is different from the events themselves, much as the minds of the gods cannot be read just by witnessing their deeds. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The twentieth century was the bankruptcy of the social utopia; the twenty-first will be that of the technological one. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The weak shows his strength and hides his weaknesses; the magnificent exhibits his weaknesses like ornaments. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
[A] theory is a very dangerous thing to have. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb