Top 367 Quotes & Sayings by Nassim Nicholas Taleb - Page 3

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

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

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

Love without sacrifice is like theft

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.

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.

Restaurants get you in with food to sell you liquor; religions get you in with belief to sell you rules.

The problem of knowledge is that there are many more books on birds written by ornithologists than books on birds written by birds and books on ornithologists written by birds

The more data we have, the more likely we are to drown in it.

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.

The psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has a simple heuristic. Never ask the doctor what you should do. Ask him what he would do if he were in your place. You would be surprised at the difference

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

At no point in history have so many non-risk-takers, that is, those with no personal exposure, exerted so much control.

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.

An ad hominem attack against an individual, not against an idea, is highly flattering. It indicates that the person does not have anything intelligent to say about your message.

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

You find peace by coming to terms with what you don't know.

You will be civilized on the day you can spend a long period doing nothing, learning nothing, and improving nothing, without feeling the slightest amount of guilt.

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

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.

The curious mind embraces science; the gifted and sensitive, the arts; the practical, business; the leftover becomes an economist

The characteristic feature of the loser is to bemoan, in general terms, mankind's flaws, biases, contradictions, and irrationality - without exploiting them for fun and profit

The difference between slaves in Roman and Ottoman days and today's employees is that slaves did not need to flatter their boss.

It takes extraordinary wisdom and self-control to accept that many things have a logic we do not understand that is smarter than our own.

Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.

The imagination of the genius vastly surpasses his intellect; the intellect of the academic vastly surpasses his imagination

An elephant is vastly more efficient, metabolically, than a mouse. It's the same for a megacity as opposed to a village. But an elephant can break a leg very easily, whereas you can toss a mouse out of a window and it'll be fine. Size makes you fragile.

Meditation is a way to be narcissistic without hurting anyone

What I learned on my own I still remember

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.

By setting oneself totally free of constraints, free of thoughts, free of this debilitating activity called work, free of efforts, elements hidden in the texture of reality start staring at you; then mysteries that you never thought existed emerge in front of your eyes.

The irony of the process of thought control: the more energy you put into trying to control your ideas and what you think about, the more your ideas end up controlling you.

There are systems that use failure as fuel for improvement, where the cost of failure is small.

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.

In economic life and history more generally, just about everything of consequence comes from black swans; ordinary events have paltry effects in the long term.

For the robust, an error is information.

It does not matter how frequently something succeeds if failure is too costly to bear.

Never take advice from someone wearing a tie.

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

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 that the new comes from here and gets imitated elsewhere. And it is not thanks to universities, which obviously claim a lot more credit than their accomplishments warrant. Like Britain in the Industrial Revolution, America's asset is, simply, risk taking and the use of optionality, this remarkable ability to engage in rational forms fo trial and error, with no comparative shame in failing again, starting again, and repeating failure.

You need a story to displace a story.

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.

If you don't feel that you haven't read enough, you haven't read enough.

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

Stoicism is about the *domestication* of emotions, not their elimination.

Greatness starts with the replacement of hatred with polite disdain.

Probability is not a mere computation of odds on the dice or more complicated variants; it is the acceptance of the lack of certainty in our knowledge and the development of methods for dealing with our ignorance.

Just as being nice to the arrogant is no better than being arrogant toward the nice, being accommodating toward anyone committing a nefarious action condones it.

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 inability to predict outliers implies the inability to predict the course of history

Things always become obvious after the fact

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.

I want to live happily in a world I don’t understand.

There is a certain category of fool-the overeducated, the academic, the journalist, the newspaper reader, the mechanistic scientist, the pseudo-empiricist, those endowed with what I call epistemic arrogance, this wonderful ability to discount what they did not see, the unobserved.

An option hides where we don't want it to hide.

Categorizing is necessary for humans, but it becomes pathological when the category is seen as definitive, preventing people from considering the fuzziness of boundaries, let alone revising their categories.

What is nonmeasurable and nonpredictable will remain nonmeasurable and nonpredictable ... no matter how much hate mail I get.

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

A man without a heroic bent starts dying at the age of thirty.

Banks have never made money in the history of banking, losing the equivalent of all their past profits periodically - while bankers strike it rich.