Top 100 Taleb's Quotes
#1. Taleb's hero, on the other hand, is Karl Popper, who said that you could not know with any certainty that a proposition was true;
Malcolm Gladwell
#2. 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
#3. Seneca's version of that Stoicism is antifragility from fate. No downside from Lady Fortuna, plenty of upside.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#4. People who forecast simply because "that's my job," knowing pretty well that their forecast is ineffectual, are not what I would call ethical. What they do is no different from repeating lies simply because "it's my job."
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#6. I no longer care about the financial system. I gave them my roadmap. OK? Thanks, bye. I've no idea what's going on. I'm disconnected. I'm totally disengaged.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#7. When I trade, I don't have an agency problem; I have my neck on the line. When a bank or banker trades, it's not his neck on the line.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#8. I remind myself of Einstein's remark that common sense is nothing but a collection of misconceptions acquired by age 18 ...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#9. Never, never, never think - that's one lesson you should have in life. Never think that lack of variability is stability.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#10. I drive a hybrid, moving into an electric car. I only drink tap water, never consume food that's travelled.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#12. I'm in favour of religion as a tamer of arrogance. For a Greek Orthodox, the idea of God as creator outside the human is not God in God's terms. My God isn't the God of George Bush.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#13. The novelist Umberto Eco famously kept what the writer Nassim Taleb called an "anti-library," a vast collection of books he had not read, believing that one's personal trove should contain as much of what you don't know as possible. Some
Pamela Paul
#14. Modernity starts with the state monopoly on violence, and ends with the state's monopoly on fiscal irresponsibility.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#15. Is the economy something organic or is it something engineered? I think it's closer to the organic. You harm it by artificially suppressing volatility in it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#16. To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week's newspapers.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#17. Modernity's double punishment is to make us both age prematurely and live longer.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#18. Stoicism's Emotional Robustification Success brings an asymmetry: you now have a lot more to lose than to gain. You are hence fragile.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#19. He provides the example of a philosopher who puzzles about the reality of time, but who nonetheless applies for a research grant to work on the philosophical problem of time during next year's sabbatical - without doubting the reality of next year's arrival.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#20. If you want to get an idea of a friend's temperament, ethics, and personal elegance, you need to look at him under the tests of severe circumstances, not under the regular rosy glow of daily life.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#21. You exist if and only if you are free to do things without a visible objective, with no justification and, above all, outside the dictatorship of someone else's narrative.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#22. 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.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#23. A country's assets reside in the tinkerers, the hobbyists, and the risk-takers.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#24. We humans lack imagination, to the point of not even knowing what tomorrow's important things will look like.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#25. 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
#26. The traits I respect are erudition and the courage to stand up when half-men are afraid for their reputation. Any idiot can be intelligent.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#27. Do not take someone's silence as his pride,perhaps he is busy fighting with his self
Ali Ibn Abi Taleb
#28. Wittgenstein's ruler: Unless you have confidence in the ruler's reliability, if you use a ruler to measure a table you may also be using the table to measure the ruler.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#29. It certainly takes bravery to remain skeptical; it takes inordinate courage to introspect, to confront oneself, to accept one's limitations
Scientists are seeing more and more evidence that we are specifically designed by mother nature to fool ourselves.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#30. I have always hated employment and the associated dependence on someone else's arbitrary opinion, particularly when much of what's done inside large corporations violates my sense of ethics.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#31. Michelangelo was asked by the pope about the secret of his genius, particularly how he carved the statue of David, largely considered the masterpiece of all masterpieces. His answer was: "It's simple. I just remove everything that is not David.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#32. The appearance of busyness reinforces the perception of causality, of the link between results, and one's role in them.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#33. The consequences are not trivial: It means that rational thinking has little, very little, to do with risk avoidance. Much of what rational thinking seems to do is rationalize one's actions by fitting some logic to them.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#34. 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
#35. If the past, by bringing surprises, did not resemble the past previous to it (what I call the past's past), then why should our future resemble our current past?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#36. 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
#37. When you ask people, 'What's the opposite of fragile?,' they tend to say robust, resilient, adaptable, solid, strong. That's not it. The opposite of fragile is something that gains from disorder.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#38. And, what's worse, we didn't get where we are today thanks to policy makers - but thanks to the appetite for risks and errors of a certain class of people we need to encourage, protect, and respect.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#39. 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
#40. Most so-called writers keep writing and writing with the hope to, some day, find something to say.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#41. The American people will eventually get hurt by this accumulated deficit. That's the problem. We have too much deficit. We have to find a solution.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#42. 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.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#43. The characteristic feature of the loser is to bemoan, in general terms, mankind's flaws, biases, contradictions, and irrationality - without exploiting them for fun and profit
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#44. Note that scholars are judged mostly on how many times their work is referenced in other people's work and thus cliques are formed of people who quote one another. It's an "I quote you, you quote me" type of business.
Nicholas Nassim Taleb
#46. ...the mental probabilistic map in one's mind is so geared toward sensational that one would realize informational gains by dispensing with the news.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#47. 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
#48. This is hard to accept in the age of the Internet. It has been very hard for me to explain that the more data you get, the less you know what's going on, and the more iatrogenics you will cause. People are still under the illusion that "science" means more data.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#49. The classical man's worst fear was inglorious death; the modern man's worst fear is just death
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#50. Keeping one's distance from an ignorant person is equivalent to keeping company with a wise man.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#52. Never ask a trader if he is profitable: you can easily see it in his gesture and gait.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#53. A Stoic is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into transformation, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#55. On the day when we are able to foresee inventions we will be living in a state where everything conceivable has been invented. Our
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#56. Psychologists have shown 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.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#57. An Eastern poet, Ali Ben Abu Taleb, writes with sad truth,
He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare,
And he who has one enemy shall meet him everywhere.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#58. Karl Marx, a visionary, figured out that you can control a slave much better by convincing him he is an employee.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#59. Make sure that you are in a situation where the constant mistakes are small and can be used for something.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#60. It might be useful to be able to predict war. But tension does not necessarily lead to war, but often to peace and to denouement.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#61. We have managed to transfer religious belief into gullibility for whatever can masquerade as science.
Nicholas Nassim Taleb
#62. Writers are remembered for their best work, politicians for their worst mistakes, and businessmen are almost never remembered.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#64. Wear your best for your execution and stand dignified. Your last recourse against randomness is how you act - if you can't control outcomes, you can control the elegance of your behaviour. You will always have the last word.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#65. The best way to learn a language may be an episode of jail in a foreign country.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#67. Only in recent history has "working hard" signaled pride rather than shame for lack of talent, finesse and, mostly, sprezzatura .
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#68. In the past, only some of the males, but all of the females, were able to procreate. Equality is more natural for females.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#69. follows: to understand the future to the point of being able to predict it, you need to incorporate elements from this future itself. If
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#70. When you walk the walk, whether successful or not, you feel more indifferent and robust to people's opinion, freer, more real.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#71. it did not so much judge the quality of a trader's performance as encourage him to game the system by working for short-term profits at the expense of possible blowups - like
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#72. Evidence shows that we do much less thinking than we believe we do - except, of course, when we think about it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#73. My lesson from Soros is to start every meeting at my boutique by convincing everyone that we are a bunch of idiots who know nothing and are mistake-prone, but happen to be endowed with the rare privilege of knowing it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#74. Every time you use a coffeemaker for your morning cappuccino, you are benefiting from the fragility of the coffeemaking entrepreneur who failed. He failed in order to help put the superior merchandise on your kitchen counter.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#75. What made medicine fool people for so long was that its successes were prominently displayed and its mistakes (literally) buried.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#76. Something has worked in the past, until - well, it unexpectedly no longer does, and what we have learned from the past turns out to be at best irrelevant or false, at worst viciously misleading.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#78. The author cites researcher David Howard's idea of post-traumatic growth. Howard contends that some individuals faced with a traumatic event actually develop new strength.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#79. When some systems are stuck in a dangerous impasse, randomness and only randomness can unlock them and set them free.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#80. Scepticism is effortful and costly. It is better to be sceptical about matters of large consequences, and be imperfect, foolish and human in the small and the aesthetic.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#81. This simple inability to remember not the true sequence of events but a reconstructed one will make history appear in hindsight to be far more explainable than it actually was - or is.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#82. The epiphany I had in my career in randomness came when I understood that I was not intelligent enough, nor strong enough, to even try to fight my emotions.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#83. 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.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#84. Some business bets in which one wins big but infrequently, yet loses small but frequently, are worth making if others are suckers for them and if you have the personal and intellectual stamina.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#85. The problem lies in the structure of our minds: we don't learn rules, just facts, and only facts.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#86. 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
#90. We are quick to forget that just being alive is an extraordinary piece of good luck, a remote event, a chance occurrence of monstrous proportions.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#92. wealth does not count so much into one's well-being as the route one uses to get to it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#93. He saves his iciest hate for economists. Taleb has no use for the "charlatanic" field, comparing economic research to medieval medicine.
Anonymous
#94. I have anecdotal evidence in my business that MBAs tend to blow up in financial markets, as they are trained to simplify matters a couple of steps beyond their requirement. (I beg the MBA reader not to take offense; I am myself the unhappy holder of the degree.)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#95. People do not realize that the media is paid to get your attention. For a journalist, silence rarely surpasses any word.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#98. People often need to suspend their self-promotion, and have someone in their lives they do not need to impress. This explains dog ownership.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#99. Probability and expectation are not the same. Its probability and probability times the pay off.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#100. 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
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
