Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes

“You may never know what type of person someone is unless they are given opportunities to violate moral or ethical codes.”

“The irony of the process of thought control: the more energy you put into trying to control your ideas and what you think about, the more your ideas end up controlling you.”

“This is the tragedy of modernity: as with neurotically overprotective parents, those trying to help are often hurting us the most.”

“If you have more than one reason to do something (choose a doctor or veterinarian, hire a gardener or an employee, marry a person, go on a trip), just don’t do it. It does not mean that one reason is better than two, just that by invoking more than one reason you are trying to convince yourself to do something. Obvious decisions (robust to error) require no more than a single reason.”

“Difficulty is what wakes up the genius”

“Most humans manage to squander their free time, as free time makes them dysfunctional, lazy, and unmotivated—the busier they get, the more active they are at other tasks.”

“Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.”

“Suckers try to win arguments, nonsuckers try to win.”

“Abundance is harder for us to handle than scarcity.”

“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.”

“He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once.”

“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”

“I want to live happily in a world I don’t understand.”

“The curse of modernity is that we are increasingly populated by a class of people who are better at explaining than understanding, or better at explaining than doing.”

“What matters isn’t what a person has or doesn’t have; it is what he or she is afraid of losing.”

“Courage is the only virtue you cannot fake.”

“Scars signal skin in the game.”

“Avoid taking advice from someone who gives advice for a living, unless there is a penalty for their advice.”

“Entrepreneurs are heroes in our society. They fail for the rest of us.”

“No person in a transaction should have certainty about the outcome while the other one has uncertainty.”

“You will never fully convince someone that he is wrong; only reality can.”

“Alexander said that it was preferable to have an army of sheep led by a lion than an army of lions led by a sheep.”

“How much you truly “believe” in something can be manifested only through what you are willing to risk for it.”