Quotes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Perhaps the wise one is the one who knows that he cannot see things far away.

Popper introduced the mechanism of conjectures and refutations, which works as follows: you formulate a (bold) conjecture and you start looking for the observation that would prove you wrong.

In spite of what is studied in business schools concerning "economies of scale," size hurts you at times of stress; it is not a good idea to be large during difficult times.

If your private life conflicts with your intellectual opinion, it cancels your intellectual ideas, not your private life.

Seize any opportunity or anything that looks like opportunity.

There is something like a switch in us that kills the individual in favor of the collective when people engage in communal dances, mass riots, or war. Your mood is now that of the herd. You are part of what Elias Canetti calls the rhythmic and throbbing crowd

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.

What they call philosophy I call literature; what they call literature I call journalism; what they call journalism I call gossip; and what they call gossip I call (generously) voyeurism.

we are not made to view things as independent from each other. When viewing two events A and B, it is hard not to assume that A causes B, B causes A, or both cause each other. Our bias is immediately to establish a causal link.

Because what matters in life isn't how frequently one is "right" about outcomes, but how much one makes when one is right. Being wrong, when it is not costly, doesn't count—in a way that's similar to trial-and-error mechanisms of research.

Information is antifragile; it feeds more on attempts to harm it than it does on efforts to promote it. For instance, many wreck their reputations merely by trying to defend them.

To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week's newspapers.

Not everything that happens happens for a reason, but everything that survives survives for a reason.

Life is sacrifice and risk taking, and nothing that doesn't entail some moderate amount of the former, under the constraint of satisfying the latter, is close to what we can call life. If you do not undertake a risk of real harm, reparable or even potentially irreparable, from an adventure, it is not an adventure.

Not seeing a tsunami or an economic event coming is excusable; building something fragile to them is not.

People often need to suspend their self-promotion, and have someone in their lives they do not need to impress. This explains dog ownership.

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

Social science means inventing a certain brand of human we can understand.

Don't talk about "progress" in terms of longevity, safety, or comfort before comparing zoo animals to those in the wilderness.

Nation-states like war; city-states like commerce; families like stability; and individuals like entertainment

We humans are not just a superficial race (this may be curable to some extent); we are a very unfair one.

companies trying to misrepresent the product they sell by playing with our cognitive biases, our unconscious associations, and that's sneaky. The latter is done by, say, showing a poetic picture of a sunset with a cowboy smoking and forcing an association between great romantic moments and some given product that, logically, has no possible connection to it. You seek a romantic moment and what you get is cancer.

There are designations, like "economist," "prostitute," or "consultant," for which additional characterization doesn't add information.

I discovered that it is much more effective to act like a nice guy and be reasonable if you prove willing to go beyond just verbiage. You can afford to be compassionate, lax, and courteous if, once in a while, when it is least expected of you, but completely justified, you sue someone, or savage an enemy, just to show that you can walk the walk.