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Nassim Nicholas Taleb
199 quotes
“Older people are most beautiful when they have what is lacking in the young: poise, , wisdom, , and this post-heroic absence of agitation.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What fools call “wasting time” is most often the best investment.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Read nothing from the past one hundred years; eat no fruits from the past one thousand years; drink nothing from the past four thousand years (just wine and water); but talk to no ordinary man over forty.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A man without a heroic bent starts dying at the age of thirty.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Someone who says “I am busy” is either declaring incompetence (and lack of control of his life) or trying to get rid of you.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The difference between slaves in Roman and Ottoman days and today’s employees is that slaves did not need to flatter their boss.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You are rich if and only if money you refuse tastes better than money you accept.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Modernity: we created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You can tell how uninteresting a person is by asking him whom he finds interesting.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Preoccupation with efficacy is the main obstacle to a poetic, elegant, robust and heroic life.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Charm is the ability to insult people without offending them; nerdiness the reverse.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Those who do not think that employment is systemic slavery are either blind or employed.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“They are born, put in a box; they go home to live in a box; they study by ticking boxes; they go to what is called “work” in a box, where they sit in their cubicle box; they drive to the grocery store in a box to buy food in a box; they talk about thinking “outside the box”; and when they die they are put in a box.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The twentieth century was the bankruptcy of the social utopia; the twenty-first will be that of the technological one.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You have a real life if and only if you do not compete with anyone in any of your pursuits.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Only in recent history has “working hard” signaled pride rather than shame for lack of talent, finesse and, mostly, sprezzatura.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What they call “play” (gym, travel, sports) looks like work.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Decomposition, for most, starts when they leave the free, social, and uncorrupted college life for the solitary confinement of professions and nuclear families.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Hard science gives sensational results with a horribly boring process; philosophy gives boring results with a sensational process; literature gives sensational results with a sensational process; and economics gives boring results with a boring process.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A good maxim allows you to have the last word without even starting a conversation.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The fool generalizes the particular; the nerd particularizes the general; ... the wise does neither.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You want to be yourself, idiosyncratic; the collective (school, rules, jobs, technology) wants you generic to the point of castration.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The sucker’s trap is when you focus on what you know and what others don’t know, rather than the reverse.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Mental clarity is the child of courage, not the other way around.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Greatness starts with the replacement of hatred with polite disdain.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The tragedy of virtue is that the more obvious, boring, unoriginal, and sermonizing the proverb, the harder it is to implement.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ethical man accords his profession to his beliefs, instead of according his beliefs to his profession.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Just as dyed hair makes older men less attractive, it is what you do to hide your weaknesses that makes them repugnant.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When conflicted between two choices, take neither.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For the robust, an error is information.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We learn the most from fools ... yet we pay them back with the worst ingratitude.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The best test of whether someone is extremely stupid (or extremely wise) is whether financial and political news makes sense to him.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The weak shows his strength and hides his weaknesses; the magnificent exhibits his weaknesses like ornaments.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Social science means inventing a certain brand of human we can understand.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Because our minds need to reduce information, we are more likely to try to squeeze a phenomenon into the Procrustean bed of a crisp and known category (amputating the unknown), rather than suspend categorization, and make it tangible. Thanks to our detections of false patterns, along with real ones, what is random will appear less random and more certain—our overactive brains are more likely to impose the wrong, simplistic, narrative than no narrative at all.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We are robust when errors in the representation of the unknown and understanding of random effects do not lead to adverse outcomes —fragile otherwise.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To become a philosopher, start by walking very slowly.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I want to live happily in a world I don't understand.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We didn't get where we are thanks to the sissy notion of resilience.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Simplicity is not so simple to attain.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Modernity has replaced ethics with legalese.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source