Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes

219 quotes in 2438 categories

• I no longer care about the financial system. I gave them my roadmap. OK? Thanks, bye. I've no idea what's going on. I'm disconnected. I'm…
• Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW. You need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel or a private jet.
• 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…
• ...maximize the serendipity around you.
• Answer e-mails from junior people before more senior ones. Junior people have further to go and tend to remember who slighted them.
• Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.
• He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once.
• Modernity has replaced ethics with legalese, and the law can be gamed with a good lawyer.
• Let me be more aggressive: we are largely better at doing than we are at thinking, thanks to antifragility. I’d rather be dumb and antifragile…
• This is the tragedy of modernity: as with neurotically overprotective parents, those trying to help are often hurting us the most.
• Many people keep deploring the low level of formal education in the United states (as defined by, say, math grades). Yet these fail to realize…
• But they never notice the following inconsistency: this so-called worst-case event, when it happened, exceeded the worst case at the time.
• 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…
• I want to live happily in a world I don’t understand.
• Further, in writing, I feel corrupt and unethical if I have to look up a subject in a library as part of the writing itself.…
• Never ask anyone for their opinion, forecast, or recommendation. Just ask them what they have—or don’t have—in their portfolio.
• Suckers try to win arguments, nonsuckers try to win.
• An erudite is someone who displays less than he knows; a journalist or consultant the opposite.
• Most so-called writers keep writing and writing with the hope, some day, to find something to say.
• Wittgenstein's ruler: Unless you have confidence in the ruler's reliability, if you use a ruler to measure a table you may also be using the…

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