Nassim Nicholas Taleb quotes - page 4

Probability is not about the odds, but about the belief in the existence of an alternative outcome, cause, or motive. (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)
It does not matter how frequently something succeeds if failure is too costly to bear. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The best way to learn a language may be an episode of jail in a foreign country. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Much of aging comes from a misunderstanding of the effect of comfort. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
What fools call "wasting time” is most often the best investment. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Success is becoming in middle adulthood what you dreamed to be in late childhood. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Information is antifragile; it feeds more on attempts to harm it than it does on efforts to promote it. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
For the robust, an error is information. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Daily news and sugar confuse our system in the same manner. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
A man without a heroic bent starts dying at the age of thirty. (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)
The tragedy of virtue is that the more obvious, boring, unoriginal, and sermonizing the proverb, the harder it is to implement. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
While in theory randomness is an intrinsic property, in practice, randomness is incomplete information. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Asking science to explain life and vital matters is equivalent to asking a grammarian to explain poetry. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Bureaucracy is a construction by which a person is conveniently separated from the consequences of his or her actions. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Economic life should be definancialised. We should learn not to use markets as storehouses of value: they do not harbour the certainties that normal citizens require. Citizens should experience anxiety about their own businesses (which they control), not their investments. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
We learn the most from fools ... yet we pay them back with the worst ingratitude. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Social science means inventing a certain brand of human we can understand. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
To become a philosopher, start by walking very slowly. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The fragile wants tranquility, the antifragile grows from disorder, and the robust doesn't care too much. (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)
This is the central illusion in life: that randomness is a risk, that it is a bad thing ... View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
What is nonmeasurable and nonpredictable will remain nonmeasurable and nonpredictable ... no matter how much hate mail I get. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
I suppose that the main benefit of being rich (over just being independent) is to be able to despise rich people (a good concentration of whom you find in glitzy ski resorts) without any sour grapes. It is even sweeter when these farts don't know that you are richer than they are. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
I want to live happily in a world I don't understand. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb