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…
Browse Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes by Category