Top 367 Quotes & Sayings by Nassim Nicholas Taleb - Page 4

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

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.

We glorify those who left their names in history books at the expense of those contributors about whom our books are silent. We humans are not just a superficial race - we are a very unfair one.

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

We should reward people, not ridicule them, for thinking the impossible.

You want to favor systems that benefit from error, disorder, variability and things like that. You want to favor these systems and unfortunately, when - there's something I call the Soviet Illusion. The more the government becomes intrusive, the more things have to follow a script, and it can't handle this kind of system.

We should probably stop trading derivatives, anything more complex than regular options ... I am an options trader, and I don't understand options. How do you want a regulator to understand them?

Don't ask the barber whether you need a haircut, and don't ask an academic if what he does is relevant.

Remember that you are a Black Swan.

Daily news and sugar confuse our system in the same manner.

In poor countries, officials receive explicit bribes; in D.C. they get the sophisticated, implicit, unspoken promise to work for large corporations

You get pseudo-order when you seek order; you only get a measure of order and control when you embrace randomness.

There are secrets to our world that only practice can reveal, and no opinion or analysis will ever capture in full.

The opposite of fragile is something that gains from disorder.

The sucker's trap is when you focus on what you know and what others don't know, rather than the reverse.

Failure saves lives. In the airline industry, every time a plane crashes the probability of the next crash is lowered by that.

The same past data can confirm a theory and its exact opposite! If you survive until tomorrow, it could mean that either a) you are more likely to be immortal or b) that you are closer to death.

If you hear a "prominent" economist using the word 'equilibrium,' or 'normal distribution,' do not argue with him; just ignore him, or try to put a rat down his shirt.

Wear your best for your execution and stand dignified. Your last recourse against randomness is how you act - if you can't control outcomes, you can control the elegance of your behaviour. You will always have the last word.

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

It is my great hope someday, to see science and decision makers rediscover what the ancients have always known. Namely that our highest currency is respect.

Ideas come and go, stories stay.

Simplicity is not so simple to attain.

The worst side effect of wealth is the social associations it forces on its victims, as people with big houses end up socializing with other people with big houses.

Modernity has replaced ethics with legalese, and the law can be gamed with a good lawyer.

Suckers think that you cure greed with money, addiction with substances, expert problems with experts, banking with bankers, economics with economists, and debt crises with debt spending

We tend to treat our knowledge as personal property to be protected and defended. It is an ornament that allows us to rise in the pecking order. [...] We take what we know a little too seriously.

Dress your best on your execution day. Be extremely courteous to your assistant when you lose money. Try not to blame others for your fate, even if they deserve blame. Never exhibit any self-pity. Do not complain.

An erudite is someone who displays less than he knows; a journalist or consultant the opposite.

Writing is the art of repeating oneself without anyone noticing.

A prophet is not someone with special visions, just someone blind to most of what others see

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.

When some systems are stuck in a dangerous impasse, randomness and only randomness can unlock them and set them free.

The classical man's worst fear was inglorious death; the modern man's worst fear is just death

Rank beliefs not according to their plausibility but by the harm they may cause.

Those who were unlucky in life in spite of their skills would eventually rise. The lucky fool might have benefited from some luck in life; over the longer run he would slowly converge to the state of a less-lucky idiot. Each one would revert to his long-term properties.

Don't disturb complicated systems that have been around for a very long time. We don't understand their logic. Don't pollute the planet. Leave it the way we found it, regardless of scientific 'evidence'.

If you sat with a pencil and jotted down all the decisions you've taken in the past week, or, if you could, over your lifetime, you would realize that almost all of them have had asymmetric payoff, with one side carrying a larger consequence than the other. You decide principally based on fragility, not probability. Or to rephrase, You decide principally based on fragility, not so much on True/False.

Much of aging comes from a misunderstanding of the effect of comfort.

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 than extremely smart and fragile, any time.

When we want to do something while unconsciously certain to fail, we seek advice so we can blame someone else for the failure.

If my detractors knew me better they would hate me even more.

To become a philosopher, start by walking very slowly.

What fools call "wasting time" is most often the best investment.

What they call "play" (gym, travel, sports) looks like work.

He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once. And someone who has made plenty of errors-though never the same error more than once-is more reliable than someone who has never made any.

Never ask anyone for their opinion, forecast, or recommendation. Just ask them what they have—or don’t have—in their portfolio.

Information is antifragile; it feeds more on attempts to harm it than it does on efforts to promote it.

There is no effective difference between guessing a variable that is not random, but for which information is partial or deficient, and a random one. In this sense, guessing (what I don't know, but what someone else may know) and predicting (what has not taken place yet) are the same thing.

By all means, avoid words—threats, complaints, justification, narratives, reframing, attempts to win arguments, supplications; avoid words!

The fool generalizes the particular; the nerd particularizes the general; some do both; and the wise does neither

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

Half of the people lie with their lips; the other half with their tears

If one puts an infinite number of monkeys in front of typewriters, and lets them clap away, there is a certainty that one of them will come out with an exact version of the 'Iliad.'

A mistake is not something to be determined after the fact, but in the light of the information until that point.

Make sure that you are in a situation where the constant mistakes are small and can be used for something.

Redundancy is ambiguous because it seems like a waste if nothing unusual happens. Except that something unusual happens-usually .

The fragile wants tranquility, the antifragile grows from disorder, and the robust doesn't care too much.

Older people are most beautiful when they have what is lacking in the young: poise, erudition, wisdom, phronesis, and this post-heroic absence of agitation.

We cannot truly plan, because we do not understand the future-but this is not necessarily a bad news. We could plan while bearing in mind such limitations. It just takes guts.