Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Essayist, epistemologist, researcher, and former practitioner of mathematical finance.
There is no such thing as a failed soldier, dead or alive (unless he acted in a cowardly manner)—likewise there is no such thing as a failed entrepreneur or failed scientific researcher ...
A man without a heroic bent starts dying at the age of thirty.
When some systems are stuck in a dangerous impasse, randomness and only randomness can unlock them and set them free.
If I could predict what my day would exactly look like, I would feel a little bit dead.
Only in recent history has “working hard” signaled pride rather than shame for lack of talent, finesse and, mostly, sprezzatura.
[E]conomics is a narrative discipline, and explanations are easy to fit retrospectively. (page 257)
Information is antifragile; it feeds more on attempts to harm it than it does on efforts to promote it.
Success is becoming in middle adulthood what you dreamed to be in late childhood.
An option hides where we don't want it to hide.
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.
We should reward people, not ridicule them, for thinking the impossible.
At no point during his ordeal did Nero think of himself as 72% alive and 28% dead.
Decomposition, for most, starts when they leave the free, social, and uncorrupted college life for the solitary confinement of professions and nuclear families.
The sucker’s trap is when you focus on what you know and what others don’t know, rather than the reverse.
Probability is a liberal art; it is a child of skepticism, not a tool for people with calculators on their belts to satisfy their desire to produce fancy calculations and certainties.
We favor the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated, and the tangible; we scorn the abstract.
There is no effective difference between guessing a variable that is not random, but for which information is partial or deficient (...), and a random one (...). In this sense, guessing (what I don't know, but what someone else may know) and predicting (what has not taken place yet) are the same thing.
Lucky fools do not bear the slightest suspicion that they may be lucky fools - by definition, they do not know that they belong to such a category.
Modernity: we created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur.
The fool generalizes the particular; the nerd particularizes the general; ... the wise does neither.