Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes

Doctors most commonly get mixed up between absence of evidence and evidence of abense

The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.

A Stoic is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into transformation, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking.

For many people, commuting is the worst part of the day, and policies that can make commuting shorter and more convenient would be a straightforward way to reduce minor but widespread suffering.

Decomposition, for most, starts when they leave the free, social, and uncorrupted college life for the solitary confinement of professions and nuclear families.

People used to wear ordinary clothes weekdays, and formal attire on Sunday. Today it is the exact reverse.

Democracies can't handle austerity measures very well.

They are born, put in a box; they go home to live in a box; they study by ticking boxes; they go to what is called "work" in a box, where they sit in their cubicle box; they drive to the grocery store in a box to buy food in a box; they talk about thinking "outside the box"; and when they die they are put in a box.

Missing a train is only painful if you run after it! Likewise, not matching the idea of success others expect from you is only painful if that’s what you are seeking.

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

Love without sacrifice is like theft

Avoid losers. If you hear someone use the words 'impossible', 'never', 'too difficult' too often, drop him or her from your social network.

Someone who says "I am busy" is either declaring incompetence (and lack of control of his life) or trying to get rid of you.

Karl Marx, a visionary, figured out that you can control a slave much better by convincing him he is an employee.

If there is something in nature you don't understand, odds are it makes sense in a deeper way that is beyond your understanding. So there is a logic to natural things that is much superior to our own. Just as there is a dichotomy in law: 'innocent until proven guilty' as opposed to 'guilty until proven innocent', let me express my rule as follows: what Mother Nature does is rigorous until proven otherwise; what humans and science do is flawed until proven otherwise.

Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg didn't finish college. Too much emphasis is placed on formal education - I told my children not to worry about their grades but to enjoy learning.

If you have more than one reason to do something (choose a doctor or veterinarian, hire a gardener or an employee, marry a person, go on a trip), just don’t do it. It does not mean that one reason is better than two, just that by invoking more than one reason you are trying to convince yourself to do something. Obvious decisions (robust to error) require no more than a single reason.

A competitive athlete is painful to look at; trying hard to become an animal rather than a man, he will never be as fast as a cheetah or as strong as an ox.

Umberto Eco is the owner of a large personal library of almost 30,000 books that he has not read. [To him] read books are far less valuable than unread ones.

Your reputation is harmed the most by what you say to defend it.

Answer e-mails from junior people before more senior ones. Junior people have further to go and tend to remember who slighted them.

Social science means inventing a certain brand of human we can understand.

Don't cross a river if it is four feet deep on average.

Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility; it results from some ecological or naturalistic wisdom, and is not always bad - at an existential level, it is my body rebelling against its entrapment. It is my soul fighting the Procrustean bed of modernity.

The traits I respect are erudition and the courage to stand up when half-men are afraid for their reputation. Any idiot can be intelligent.

The central idea in The Black Swan is that: rare events cannot be estimated from empirical observation since they are rare.

They think that intelligence is about noticing things are relevant (detecting patterns); in a complex world, intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant (avoiding false patterns)

Intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant.

People are much less interested in what you are trying to show them than what you are trying to hide.

If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud.

Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love.

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.

Only in recent history has "working hard" signaled pride rather than shame for lack of talent, finesse and, mostly, sprezzatura .

Never, never, never think - that's one lesson you should have in life. Never think that lack of variability is stability.

The difference between technology and slavery is that slaves are fully aware that they are not free

People focus on role models; it is more effective to find antimodels - people you don't want to resemble when you grow up

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.

Learn to fail with pride - and do so fast and cleanly. Maximise trial and error - by mastering the error part.

It is a sign of weakness to avoid showing signs of weakness.

Life is a tightrope between two errors: generalizing the wrong particular and particularizing the wrong general.

You exist if and only if you are free to do things without a visible objective, with no justification and, above all, outside the dictatorship of someone else's narrative.

Anything that provides you with very, very stable income, very stable conditions, maybe generally stable, that often, it masks real risks, risks of blow-ups.

When you develop your opinions on the basis of weak evidence, you will have difficulty interpreting subsequent information that contradicts these opinions, even if this new information is obviously more accurate.

What I learned on my own I still remember

...maximize the serendipity around you.

This is the tragedy of modernity: as with neurotically overprotective parents, those trying to help are often hurting us the most.

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 table to measure the ruler.

Go to parties. You can't even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.

To succeed in life requires a total inability to do anything that makes you uncomfortable when you look at yourself in the mirror.

Comfort makes you weaker. We need some variability, some stressors. Not too much, but just enough.