Best 320 quotes of Nassim Nicholas Taleb on MyQuotes

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

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.

A country's assets reside in the tinkerers, the hobbyists, and the risk-takers.

Aesthetics, ethics, and many good things in humans are contagious.

A good maxim allows you to have the last word without even starting a conversation.

A good rule of thumb is as follows: If the numbers come from somebody wearing a tie (Wall Street economist or analyst, industry public relations department, captive think tank academic and so on), you ought to be very skeptical. By design messages from these people are intended to move markets, move merchandise and/or move public policy and are not a comment on the state of the physical universe.

All of technology, really, is about maximizing free options.

Also, it's good to have more than one profession, in case your own profession goes out of style. A Wall Street trader who's also a belly dancer will do a lot better than a trader who winds up driving a taxi.

A man without a heroic bent starts dying at the age of thirty.

An ad hominem attack against an individual, not against an idea, is highly flattering. It indicates that the person does not have anything intelligent to say about your message.

An elephant is vastly more efficient, metabolically, than a mouse. It's the same for a megacity as opposed to a village. But an elephant can break a leg very easily, whereas you can toss a mouse out of a window and it'll be fine. Size makes you fragile.

An erudite is someone who displays less than he knows; a journalist or consultant the opposite.

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

Another definition of modernity: conversations can be more and more completely reconstructed with clips from other conversations taking place at the same time on the planet.

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

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

Any system that is deprived of its natural volatility, with government up (unintelligible) volatile, any system becomes very fragile.

Anything organic requires some dose of variability so it can adapt all the time, and fixing things is not a good idea.

Anything that provides you with very, very stable income, very stable conditions, maybe generally stable, that often, it masks real risks, risks of blow-ups.

As countries get rich they start increasing education and the very educated people tend to not like trial and error, because they think they're obligated to use the body of knowledge they have.

[A] theory is a very dangerous thing to have.

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

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

Bankers, they're not harmed by their mistakes. They benefit when things go right, and the society pays the price.

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.

Banks have never made money in the history of banking, losing the equivalent of all their past profits periodically - while bankers strike it rich.

Being an economist is the least ethical profession, closer to charlatanism than any science.

Being an entrepreneur is an existential, not just a financial thing.

Bitcoin is the beginning of something great: a currency without a government, something necessary and imperative.

But they never notice the following inconsistency: this so-called worst-case event, when it happened, exceeded the worst case at the time.

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

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.

Capitalism is about adventurers who get harmed by their mistakes, not people who harm others with their mistakes.

Categorizing is necessary for humans, but it becomes pathological when the category is seen as definitive, preventing people from considering the fuzziness of boundaries, let alone revising their categories.

Character is proportionate to N, the number of consecutive failures without being discouraged, or equivalently, the number of successive rejections without being intimidated.

Comfort makes you weaker. We need some variability, some stressors. Not too much, but just enough.

Cumulative errors depend largely on the big surprises, the big opportunities. Not only do economic, financial, and political predictors miss them, but they are quite ashamed to say anything outlandish to their clients and yet events, it turns out, are almost always outlandish.

Daily news and sugar confuse our system in the same manner.

Debt is a mistake between lender and borrower, and both should suffer.

Decomposition, for most, starts when they leave the free, social, and uncorrupted college life for the solitary confinement of professions and nuclear families.

Deficits are like putting dynamite in the hands of children. They can get out of control very quickly.

Democracies can't handle austerity measures very well.

Doctors most commonly get mixed up between absence of evidence and evidence of abense

Don't aim to be perfect! Aim to be antifragile

Don't ask the barber whether you need a haircut, and don't ask an academic if what he does is relevant.

Don't disturb complicated systems that have been around for a very long time. We don't understand their logic. Don't pollute the planet. Leave it the way we found it, regardless of scientific 'evidence'.

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.

Dress your best on your execution day. Be extremely courteous to your assistant when you lose money. Try not to blame others for your fate, even if they deserve blame. Never exhibit any self-pity. Do not complain.

Economic life should be definancialised. We should learn not to use markets as storehouses of value: they do not harbour the certainties that normal citizens require. Citizens should experience anxiety about their own businesses (which they control), not their investments (which they do not control).

Economics make homeopath and alternative healers look empirical and scientific.