Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

We tend to use knowledge as therapy.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Injecting some confusion stabilizes the system.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

You need a story to displace a story.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

...maximize the serendipity around you.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Things always become obvious after the fact

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“you need a story to replace a story”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

What we need to do is break the financial community's grip on society.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Writing is the art of repeating oneself without anyone noticing.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Success is becoming in middle adulthood what you dreamed to be in late childhood.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The only valid political system is one that can handle an imbecile in power without suffering from it

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“Entrepreneurs are selected to be just doers, not thinkers, and doers do, they don't talk.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Bankers, they're not harmed by their mistakes. They benefit when things go right, and the society pays the price.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

For the classics philosophical insight was the product of a life of leisure; for me a life of leisure is the product…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

When you beat up someone physically, you get excercise and stress relief; when you assault him verbally on the Internet, you just…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“The four most influential moderns: Darwin, Marx, Freud, and (the productive) Einstein were scholars but not academics. It has always been hard…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Success is about honour, feeling morally calibrated, absence of shame, not what some newspaper defines from an external metric.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Missing a train is only painful if you run after it! Likewise, not matching the idea of success others expect from you…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The best test of whether someone is extremely stupid (or extremely wise) is whether financial and political news makes sense to him.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

We have this culture of financialization. People think they need to make money with their savings rather with their own business. So…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“It takes a huge investment in introspection to learn that the thirty or more hours spent “studying” the news last month neither…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I've debated many economists who claim to specialize in risk and probability: when one takes them slightly outside their narrow focus, but…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“It has been more profitable for us to bind together in the wrong direction than to be alone in the right one.…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“It is as if the mission of modernity was to squeeze every drop of variability and randomness out of life— with the…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Muscles without strength, friendship without trust, opinion without risk, change without aesthetics, age without values, food without nourishment, power without fairness, facts…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“Aside from the decorum of ancient thought as opposed to the coarseness of fresh ink, I have spent some time phrasing the…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“The observation of the numerous misfortunes that attend all conditions forbids us to grow insolent upon our present enjoyments, or to admire…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“Our human race is affected by a chronic underestimation of the possibility of the future straying from the course initially envisioned (in…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Financial institutions have been merging into a smaller number of very large banks. Almost all banks are interrelated. So the financial ecology…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“Recall that epic heroes were judged by their actions, not by the results. No matter how sophisticated our choices, how good we…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“You can imagine how distraught I feel when I hear about the glorified heroism-free “middle class values,” which, thanks to globalization and…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“I am used to facing, at the end of a conference lecture, the question “So what is the difference between robust and…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Further, in writing, I feel corrupt and unethical if I have to look up a subject in a library as part of…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“As a matter of fact, your happiness depends far more on the number of instances of positive feelings, what psychologists call "positive…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb