1. People
    2.  › 
  2. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Nassim Nicholas Taleb photo

Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes

Total quotes: 28
“We are hunters; we are only truly alive in those moments when we improvise; no schedule, just small surprises and stimuli from the environment.”
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes
Tagged: Human Nature, Impulse, What Makes Us Alive, Life
“The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.”
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes
Tagged: Addiction, Heroin
“What matters isn’t what a person has or doesn’t have; it is what he or she is afraid of losing.”
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game
Tagged: Deep, Loss, What We Have
“Religion isn’t so much about telling man that there is one God as about preventing man from thinking that he is God.”
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes
Tagged: Religion, Humans Aren't God
“Studying neurobiology to understand humans is like studying ink to understand literature.”
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes
Tagged: neurobiology, Missing The Bigger Picture, Examples of Similes
“Avoid taking advice from someone who gives advice for a living, unless there is a penalty for their advice.”
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game
Tagged: Advice, Charlatans, Educators
“Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.”
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
Tagged: antifragile, Resilience, Built To Last
“Charm is the ability to insult people without offending them; nerdiness the reverse.”
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes
Tagged: Nerds, charm, Dangers of Charm
“Medieval man was a cog in a wheel he did not understand; modern man is a cog in a complicated system he thinks he understands.”
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes
Tagged: Medieval Times, Modernity, Modern Times
“When people call you intelligent it is almost always because they agree with you. Otherwise they just call you arrogant.”
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes
Tagged: Arrogance, Intelligence
“The knowledge we get by tinkering, via trial and error, experience, and the workings of time, in other words, contact with the earth, is vastly superior to that obtained through reasoning, something self-serving institutions have been very busy hiding from us.”
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game
Tagged: Education, Expereince , trial and error, Learning, Epistemology
“To understand how something works, figure out how to break it.”
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes
Tagged: Epistemology, Understanding How Things Work, Reverse Engineering
“Failure-resistant is achievable; failure-free is not.”
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes
Tagged: Failure
“Over the long term, you are more likely to fool yourself than others.”
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes
Tagged: Self-Deception, Narrative Fallacy
“This is the central illusion in life: that randomness is risky, that it is a bad thing—and that eliminating randomness is done by eliminating randomness.”
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
Tagged: Illusions of Life, Randomness, Taming Complexity
“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, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
Tagged: History of Major Systems, Who Runs The World?
“To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week’s newspapers.”
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes
Tagged: Against Newspapers, Against The Media, Media Madness
“Literature comes alive when covering up vices, defects, weaknesses, and confusions; it dies with every trace of preaching.”
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes
Tagged: When Art Preaches, Moralism In Literature
“They think that intelligence is about noticing things that are relevant (detecting patterns); in a complex world, intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant (avoiding false patterns).”
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes
Tagged: Pattern Recognition, Intelligence
“It takes a lot of intellect and confidence to accept that what makes sense doesn’t really make sense.”
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes
Tagged: Against Logic, The Bigness of the World, Ever-Expanding Knowledge Systems
“Practitioners are usually too busy practitioning to write books, articles, papers, speeches, equations, theories and get honored by Highly Constipated and Honorable Members of Academies).”
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
Tagged: Charlatans, Doers, Theory vs. Practice
“Anything that has more upside than downside from random events (or certain shocks) is antifragile; the reverse is fragile.”
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
Tagged: antifragile
“My idea of the modern Stoic sage is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into information, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking.”
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
Tagged: Stoicism, Stoic
“It is no secret that large corporations prefer people with a family; those with downside risk are easier to own, particularly when they are choking under a large mortgage.”
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Skin of Others in your Game – INCERTO – Medium
Tagged: Mortgage, Corporate Goverance
“This (very very) dangerous virushead doesn't get that the medical system will be overloaded, hence 0000000 more casualties from unrelated conditions & diseases owing to disruptions.”
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, This(very very) dangerous virushead doesn't get that the medical system will be overloaded, hence 0000000 more casualties from unrelated conditions & diseases owing to disruptions.
“By definition, what works cannot be irrational; about every single person I know who has chronically failed in business shares that mental block, the failure to realize that if something stupid works (and makes money), it cannot be stupid .”
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game
Tagged: What Works, Understanding Rationality
“A man without a heroic bent starts dying at the age of thirty.”
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes
Tagged: Stay Young, Heroic Outlook
“It is what you do to hide your weaknesses that makes them repugnant.”
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Weaknesses
Tagged: Weaknesses, Secrets
loading next page...