Top 367 Quotes & Sayings by Nassim Nicholas Taleb - Page 5

I remind myself of Einstein's remark that common sense is nothing but a collection of misconceptions acquired by age 18.

You want failures to be small and informational. Silicon Valley does very well. It knows how to use failure as a tool for improvement.

Is the economy something organic or is it something engineered? I think it's closer to the organic. You harm it by artificially suppressing volatility in it.

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 of probability, they fall apart, with the disconsolate face of a gym rat in front of a gangster hit man.

I disagree with the followers of Marx and those of Adam Smith: the reason free markets work is because they allow people to be lucky, thanks to aggressive trial and error, not by giving rewards or "incentives" for skill.

Scientists don't know what they are talking about when they talk about religion. Religion has nothing to do with belief, and I don't believe it has any negative impact on people's lives outside of intolerance. Why do I go to church? It's like asking, why did you marry that woman? You make up reasons, but it's probably just smell. I love the smell of candles. It's an aesthetic thing.

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

Probability is not about the odds, but about the belief in the existence of an alternative outcome, cause, or motive.

My major hobby is teasing people who take themselves and the quality of their knowledge too seriously and those who don't have the guts to sometimes say: I don't know.

To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week's newspapers.

This is the central illusion in life: that randomness is a risk, that it is a bad thing.

The narrative fallacy addresses our limited ability to look at sequences of facts without weaving an explanation into them, or, equivalently, forcing a logical link, an arrow of relationship, upon them. Explanations bind facts together. They make them all the more easily remembered; they help them make more sense. Where this propensity can go wrong is when it increases our impression of understanding.

If I could predict what my day would exactly look like, I would feel a little bit dead.

We tend to use knowledge as therapy.

Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market alow you to put there.

When an investor focuses on short-term investments, he or she is observing the variability of the portfolio, not the returns - in short, being fooled by randomness.

When you beat up someone physically, you get excercise and stress relief; when you assault him verbally on the Internet, you just harm yourself.

People work out, they stress their body, and their body gets stronger from stress.

I have respect for mother nature's methods of robustness (billions of years allow most of what is fragile to break); classical thought is more robust (in its respect for the unknown, the epistemic humility) than the modern post-Enlightenment naïve pseudoscientific autism. Thus my classical values make me advocate the triplet of erudition, elegance, and courage; against modernity's phoniness, nerdiness and philistinism

It is remarkable how fast and how effectively you can construct a nationality with a flag , a few speeches, and a national anthem; to this day I avoid the label "Lebanese," preferring the less restrictive "Levantine" designation.

Mental clarity is the child of courage, not the other way around.

Bitcoin is the beginning of something great: a currency without a government, something necessary and imperative.

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

Never ask a trader if he is profitable: you can easily see it in his gesture and gait.

Suckers try to win arguments, nonsuckers try to win.

Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility.

My biggest problem with modernity may lie in the growing separation of the ethical and the legal

Probability and expectation are not the same. Its probability and probability times the pay off.

My nightmare scenario is that the government saves Citibank once again, as well as the other banks, and business resumes as usual. Then, the next time the system breaks, it breaks much, much bigger.

We didn't get where we are thanks to the sissy notion of resilience.

Education makes the wise slightly wiser, but it makes the fool vastly more dangerous.

A good rule of thumb is as follows: If the numbers come from somebody wearing a tie (Wall Street economist or analyst, industry public relations department, captive think tank academic and so on), you ought to be very skeptical. By design messages from these people are intended to move markets, move merchandise and/or move public policy and are not a comment on the state of the physical universe.

The book is the only medium left that hasn't been corrupted by the profane.

Injecting some confusion stabilizes the system.

My best definition of a nerd: someone who asks you to explain an aphorism

Experience is devoid of the cherry-picking that we find in studies.

[A] theory is a very dangerous thing to have.

The best way to learn a language may be an episode of jail in a foreign country.

Forecasting by bureaucrats tends to be used for anxiety relief rather than for adequate policy making.

Never trust a journalist unless she's your mother.

A verbal threat is the most authentic certificate of impotence.

Much of modern life is preventable chronic stress injury.

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.

I always remind myself that what one observes is at best a combination of variance and returns, not just returns.

If you're going to fail, you'd rather fail early than fail late in general.

Maximum of an average is necessarily less volatile than the average maximum

History doesn't crawl; it leaps.

Every social association that is not face-to-face is injurious to your health.

Charm is the ability to insult people without offending them; nerdiness the reverse

What organized dating sites fail to understand is that the people are far more interesting in what they don't say about themselves.

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 increase the odds of serendipitous encounters-you gain exposure to the envelope of serendipity.

We learn the most from fools ... yet we pay them back with the worst ingratitude.

My point taken further is that True and False (hence what we call "belief") play a poor, secondary role in human decisions; it is the payoff from the True and the False that dominates-and it is almost always asymmetric, with one consequence much bigger than the other, i.e., harboring positive and negative asymmetries (fragile or antifragile). Let me explain.

You want to be yourself, idiosyncratic; the collective (school, rules, jobs, technology) wants you generic to the point of castration.

Don't read newspapers for the news (just for the gossip and, of course, profiles of authors). The best filter to know if the news matters is if you hear it in cafes, restaurants... or (again) parties.

You never win an argument until they attack your person.

If you let markets - in general, my belief is that if you let markets give you information, they'll give you the information rather than artificially prop up everything.

Scientists may be in the business of laughing at their predecessors, but owing to an array of human mental dispositions, few realize that someone will laugh at their beliefs in the (disappointingly near) future.

The tragedy of virtue is that the more obvious, boring, unoriginal, and sermonizing the proverb, the harder it is to implement.

If something is going on, I hear about it. I like to talk to people, I socialise. Television is a waste of time. Human contact is what matters.