Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes

“A man is honorable in proportion to the personal risks he takes for his opinion.”

“A Stoic is a Buddhist with attitude, one who says 'f*ck you' to fate.”

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

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

“Authors, artists, and even philosophers are much better off having a very small number of fanatics behind them than a large number of people who appreciate their work.

The number of persons who dislike the work don’t count — there is no such thing as the opposite of buying your book.”

“Avoidance of boredom is the only worthy mode of action. Life otherwise is not worth living.”

“Books to me are not expanded journal articles, but reading experiences, and the academics who tend to read in order to cite in their writing – rather than read for enjoyment, curiosity, or simply because they like to read – tend to be frustrated when they can't rapidly scan the text and summarize it in one sentence that connects it to some existing discourse in which they have been involved.”

“Curiosity is antifragile, like an addiction, and is magnified by attempts to satisfy it. Books have a secret mission and ability to multiply, as everyone who has wall-to-wall bookshelves knows well.”

“Difficulty is what wakes up the genius.”

“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.”

“Further, my characterization of a loser is someone who, after making a mistake, doesn’t introspect, doesn’t exploit it, feels embarrassed and defensive rather than enriched with a new piece of information, and tries to explain why he made the mistake rather than moving on.

These types often consider themselves the 'victims' of some large plot, a bad boss, or bad weather.”

“Had Prozac been available last century, Baudelaire's 'spleen', Edgar Allan Poe's moods, the poetry of Sylvia Plath, the lamentations of so many other poets, everything with a soul would have been silenced.

If large pharmaceutical companies were able to eliminate the seasons, they would probably do so – for profit, of course.”

“He tends to mistake the unknown for the nonexistent.”

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

And someone who has made plenty of errors — though never the same error more than once — is more reliable than someone who has never made any.”

“I feel anger and frustration when I think that one in ten Americans beyond the age of high school is on some kind of antidepressant, such as Prozac. Indeed, when you go through mood swings, you now have to justify why you are not on some medication.

There may be a few good reasons to be on medication, in severely pathological cases, but my mood, my sadness, my bouts of anxiety, are a second source of intelligence – perhaps even the first source.

I get mellow and lose physical energy when it rains, become more meditative, and tend to write more and more slowly then, with the raindrops hitting the window, what Verlaine called autumnal 'sobs' (sanglots). Some days I enter poetic melancholic states, what the Portuguese call saudade or the Turks huzun (from the Arabic word for sadness).

Other days I am more aggressive, have more energy – and will write less, walk more, do other things, argue with researchers, answer emails, draw graphs on blackboards. Should I be turned into a vegetable or a happy imbecile?”

“I follow the Lindy effect as a guide in selecting what to read: books that have been around for ten years will be around for ten more; books that have been around for two millennia should be around for quite a bit of time, and so forth.”

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

“If there is something in nature you don't understand, odds are it makes sense in a deeper way that is beyond your understanding. So there is a logic to natural things that is much superior to our own.

Just as there is a dichotomy in law: 'innocent until proven guilty' as opposed to 'guilty until proven innocent', let me express my rule as follows: what Mother Nature does is rigorous until proven otherwise; what humans and science do is flawed until proven otherwise.”

“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.”

“It is as if the mission of modernity was to squeeze every drop of variability and randomness out of life — with the ironic result of making the world a lot more unpredictable, as if the goddesses of chance wanted to have the last word.”

“It is only when you don’t care about your reputation that you tend to have a good one.”

“Keeping one’s distance from an ignorant person is equivalent to keeping company with a wise man.”

“Let me be more aggressive: we are largely better at doing than we are at thinking, thanks to antifragility.

I’d rather be dumb and antifragile than extremely smart and fragile, any time.”

“Let us say that, in general, failure (and disconfirmation) are more informative than success and confirmation, which is why I claim that negative knowledge is just 'more robust'.”

“Many people keep deploring the low level of formal education in the United states (as defined by, say, math grades). Yet these fail to realize that the new comes from here and gets imitated elsewhere. And it is not thanks to universities, which obviously claim a lot more credit than their accomplishments warrant.

Like Britain in the Industrial Revolution, America's asset is, simply, risk taking and the use of optionality, this remarkable ability to engage in rational forms fo trial and error, with no comparative shame in failing again, starting again, and repeating failure.”

“Modernity has replaced ethics with legalese, and the law can be gamed with a good lawyer.”

“More data — such as paying attention to the eye colors of the people around when crossing the street — can make you miss the big truck.”

“More data means more information, but it also means more false information.”

“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.”

“Much of what other people know isn’t worth knowing.”