Nassim Nicholas Taleb famous quotes

Doctors most commonly get mixed up between absence of evidence and evidence of abense
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Doctors #Absence #Evidence

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

#Men #Economics

Love without sacrifice is like theft
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#True Love #Sacrifice #Theft

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

#Motivational #Use #Impossible

Your reputation is harmed the most by what you say to defend it.
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Reputation

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.
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Jobs #Children #College

People are much less interested in what you are trying to show them than what you are trying to hide.
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#People #Trying #Shows

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

#Pain #Mistake #Desire

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.
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Running #Ideas #Missing

Banking is a very treacherous business because you don't realize it is risky until it is too late. It is like calm waters that deliver huge storms.
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Water #Storm #Banking

The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Motivational #Work #Creativity

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.
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Information #Opinion #Weak

What I learned on my own I still remember
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Remember #Stills

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

#Visionaries #Slave #Employee

Meditation is a way to be narcissistic without hurting anyone
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Hurt #Meditation #Way

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.
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Procrastination #Exercise #Fighting

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.
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Mother #Odds #Law

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

#Order #Pseudo #Embrace

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

#Leadership #Senior #People

The classical man's worst fear was inglorious death; the modern man's worst fear is just death
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Fear #Men #Modern

Things always become obvious after the fact
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Facts #Obvious

If you want to annoy a poet, explain his poetry.
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Poetry #Want #Annoying

The Internet allows the small guy a global marketplace. But technology is harmful in the sense that we get too much information from it. Because of the web we get 10 times the amount of noise we ever got, which makes harmful fallacies far more likely.
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Technology #Guy #Noise

We know from chaos theory that even if you had a perfect model of the world, you'd need infinite precision in order to predict future events. With sociopolitical or economic phenomena, we don't have anything like that.
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Order #Perfect #World

If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud.
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Fraud

The difference between technology and slavery is that slaves are fully aware that they are not free
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Technology #Differences #Slavery

Half of the people lie with their lips; the other half with their tears
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Lying #People #Tears

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.
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Trying #Rats #Normal

People have the problem of denial. This is one of the things I learned in Lebanon. Everybody who left Beirut when the war started, including my parents, said, 'Oh, its temporary.' It lasted 17 years! People tend to underestimate the gravity of these situations. That's how they work.
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#War #Years #People

The inability to predict outliers implies the inability to predict the course of history
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Inability #Outliers

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

#Growing Up #Good Life #Role Models

It's not a good idea to take a forecast from someone wearing a tie. If possible, tease people who take themselves and their knowledge too seriously.
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Knowledge #Ideas #Ties

Never think that lack of variability is stability. Don't confuse lack of volatility with stability, ever.
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Thinking #Volatility #Stability

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

#Resilience #Get Better #Resilient

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

#Faces #Association #Social

The grandchildren should not bear the debts of the grandparents.
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Grandchildren #Grandparent #Debt

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
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Simple #Differences #Doctors

Only the autodidacts are free,
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

#Return #Combination

To become a philosopher, start by walking very slowly.
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Philosopher #Walking

The more data we have, the more likely we are to drown in it.
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Data

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

#Experience #Study #Cherries

Procrastination is the soul rebelling against entrapment.
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Procrastination #Soul #Entrapment

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.
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Swans #Long #Black

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

#Common Sense #Age #Collections

Probability and expectation are not the same. Its probability and probability times the pay off.
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Expectations #Pay #Probability

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

#Risk #Exposure

In the United States large corporations control some members of Congress. All this does is delay the corporation’s funeral at our expense.
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Funeral #Delay #Corporations

An idea starts to be interesting when you get scared of taking it to its logical conclusion.
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Ideas #Interesting #Scared

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

#Reading #Years #Week

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?
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Business #Want #Derivatives

Private equity has absolutely no reason to exist. The private equity holder has all the upside and the banks all the downside.
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Business #Finance #Reason

I want them poor and they deserve to be poor. You can't have capitalism without punishment.
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Business #Punishment #Want

It was obvious that their profits were simply cash borrowed from destiny with some random payback time.
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Destiny #Risk #Cash

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.
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Return #Portfolios #Investing

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.
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Party #Serendipity #Suffering

You find peace by coming to terms with what you don't know.
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Peace #Finding Peace #Term

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.
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Party #Gossip #News

Muscles without strength, friendship without trust, opinion without risk, change without aesthetics, age without values, food without nourishment, power without fairness, facts without rigor, degrees without erudition, militarism without fortitude, progress without civilization, complication without depth, fluency without content; these are the sins to remember.
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Civilization #Risk #Progress

What kills me makes others stronger,
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Stronger #Kill Me

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

#Anxiety #Adequate #Relief

Ideas come and go, stories stay.
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Ideas #Stories #Comes And Goes

Aesthetics, ethics, and many good things in humans are contagious.
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Ethics #Good Things #Contagious

You need a story to displace a story.
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Needs #Stories

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.
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Arrows #Understanding #Together

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

#Practice #Our World #Secret

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

#Odds #Alternatives #Outcomes

If humans fight the last war, nature fights the next one.
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#War #Fighting #Lasts

Restaurants get you in with food to sell you liquor; religions get you in with belief to sell you rules.
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Belief #Liquor #Restaurants

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.
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Believe #Talking #Smell

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.'
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Numbers #Typewriters #Statistics

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.
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#What Matters #People #Serendipity

Being an entrepreneur is an existential, not just a financial thing.
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Entrepreneur #Financial #Existential

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

#Wise #Nerd #Fool

Weak men act to satisfy their needs, stronger men their duties.
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Men #Stronger #Needs

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

#Country #Jail #May

Asking science to explain life and vital matters is equivalent to asking a grammarian to explain poetry.
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Asking #Matter

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.
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Mean #Past #Data

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.
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Flags #Speech #Labels

An option hides where we don't want it to hide.
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Want

Randomness works well in search sometimes better than humans.
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Sometimes #Randomness #Wells

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

#Randomness #Dangerous #Stuck

Injecting some confusion stabilizes the system.
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Confusion

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

#Effort #Information #Doe

Simplicity is not so simple to attain.
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Simple #Simplicity

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

#Resilience #Thanks #Sissy

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

#Looks #Littles #Feels

Modernity widened the distance between the sensational and the relevant.
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Distance #Relevant #Sensational

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.
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Taken #Differences #May

Education makes the wise slightly wiser, but it makes the fool vastly more dangerous.
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Wise #Fool #Dangerous

Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love; close enough on the surface but, to the non-sucker, not exactly the same thing.
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Academia #Enough #Surface

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.
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Eye #Reality #Effort

We favor the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated, and the tangible; we scorn the abstract.
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Tangible #Favors #Embedded

Realism is punishing. Probabilistic skepticism is worse.
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Realism #Skepticism

I hated school because I liked to daydream and the system tried to stop me from that.
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#School #Daydreaming #Hated

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
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Thinking #Addiction #Greed

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.
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Strong #Athlete #Men

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.
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#People #House #Association

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

#Risk #Illusion #Randomness

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
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Mother #Humility #Years