A Quote by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Quote Topics

Attempts Avoid Complaints Justification Means Narratives Reframing Threats Win Words

Quote Author

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Lebanese - Scientist
Born: 1960

Avoid, which many grave men have not done, words taken from sacred subjects and from elevated poetry: these we have seen vilely prostituted. Avoid too the society of the barbarians who misemploy them.

Walter Savage Landor

Writers should avoid the academy. When a writer begins to accept pay for talking about words, we know what he will produce soon: nothing but words.

Edward Abbey

I’m not too keen on talking. I always have the feeling that the words are getting away from me, escaping and scattering. It’s not to do with vocabulary or meanings, because I know quite a lot of words, but when I come out with them they get confused and scattered. That’s why I avoid stories and speeches and just stick to answering the questions I’m asked. All the extra words, the overflow, I keep to myself, the words that I silently multiply to get close to the truth.

Delphine de Vigan

I found many ways around my dyslexia, but I still have trouble transforming words into sounds. I have to memorize and rehearse before reading anything aloud to avoid embarrassing myself by mispronouncing words.

Philip Schultz

Why exactly are we so frightened of death that we avoid looking at it altogether? Somewhere, deep down, we know we cannot avoid facing death forever. We know, in Milarepa's words: "This thing called 'corpse' we dread so much is living with us here and now."

Sogyal Rinpoche

To avoid pain, they avoid pleasure. To avoid death, they avoid life.

Rajneesh

To avoid the hard necessity of either obeying or rejecting the plain instructions of our Lord in the New Testament we take refuge in a liberal interpretation of them. We evangelicals also know how to avoid the sharp point of obedience by means of fine and intricate explanations. These are tailor-made for the flesh. They excuse disobedience, comfort carnality and make the words of Christ of none effect. And the essence of it all is that Christ simply could not have meant what He said. His teachings are accepted even theoretically only after they have been weakened by interpretation.

Aiden Wilson Tozer

Avoid fancy words....If you admire fancy words, if every sky is beauteous, every blonde curvaceous, every intelligent child prodigious, if you are tickled by discombobulate, you will have bad time Reminder 14.

William Strunk, Jr.

If any issue should unite liberals and conservatives, anyone who cares about the integrity of human achievement or respect for human accomplishment, may we not all pledge to avoid the silly censoring that can lead to a codification of Orwell's Newspeak? Consider John Milton's reasons for why good arguments are often lost: 'For want of words, no doubt, or lack of breath!'

Stephen Jay Gould

In film lyrics, I avoid Persianised words because they are not widely understood.

Gulzar

If you believe certain words, you believe their hidden arguments. When you believe something is right or wrong, true or false, you believe the assumptions in the words which express the arguments. Such assumptions are often full of holes, but remain most precious to the convinced.

Frank Herbert

To die, and thus avoid poverty or love, or anything painful, is not the part of a brave man, but rather of a coward; for it is cowardice to avoid trouble, and the suicide does not undergo death because it is honorable, but in order to avoid evil.

Aristotle

I try to very hard to avoid a situation where I would be eating cat or dog; I've managed to gracefully avoid that. It's hypocritical of me and an arbitrary line, but one that I have managed to avoid crossing.

Anthony Bourdain

Place yourself in the background; write in a way that comes naturally; work from a suitable design; write with nouns and verbs; do not overwrite; do not overstate; avoid the use of qualifiers; do not affect a breezy style; use orthodox spelling; do not explain too much; avoid fancy words; do not take shortcuts as the cost of clarity; prefer the standard to the offbeat; make sure the reader knows who is speaking; do not use dialect; revise and rewrite.

E. B. White

'Words, Words, Words' was very much its title. It's just words, words, words and trying to show that I can pack as much material into an hour as I possibly could word count-wise.