Quotes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb

True humility is when you can surprise yourself more than others; the rest is either shyness or good marketing.

As Ennius wrote, "The good is mostly in the absence of bad"; Nimium boni est, cui nihil est mali.

The process of discovery (or innovation, or technological progress) itself depends on antifragile tinkering, aggressive risk bearing rather than formal education.

The Golden Rule wants you to Treat others the way you would like them to treat you. The more robust Silver Rule says Do not treat others the way you would not like them to treat you.

I noticed that very intelligent and informed persons were at no advantage over cabdrivers in their predictions, but there was a crucial difference. Cabdrivers did not believe that they understood as much as learned people - really, they were not the experts and they knew it. Nobody knew anything, but elite thinkers thought that they knew more than the rest because they were elite thinkers, and if you're a member of the elite, you automatically know more than the nonelite.

The classical man's worst fear was inglorious death; the modern man's worst fear is just death.

You never win an argument until they attack your person.

Adam Smith himself made the analogy of the economy as a watch or a clock that once set in motion continues on its own.

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, or the equivalent of losing points in a soccer game, and this absence of negative domain for book sales provides the author with a measure of optionality.

In general, positive Black Swans take time to show their effect while negative ones happen very quickly—it is much easier and much faster to destroy than to build. (During

Yet they believe blindly in the stock market, and in the abilities of their pension plan manager. Why do they do so? Because they accept that this is what people should do with their savings, because experts tell them so. The doubt their own sense, but not for a second do they doubt their automatic purchases in the stock market.

You can tell how poor someone feels by the number of times he references "money" in his conversation.

I have the fondest memories of time spent in places called ugly, the most boring ones of places called scenic.

respect for the weak being, after intellectual courage, the second most attractive quality to this author)

We flipped a coin to see who was going to pay for the meal. I lost and paid. He was about to thank me when he abruptly stopped and said that he paid for half of it probabilistically.

good news is good news first; how good matters rather little. So to have a pleasant life you should spread these small "affects" across time as evenly as possible. Plenty of mildly good news is preferable to one single lump of great news.

The fool generalizes the particular; the nerd particularizes the general; some do both; and the wise does neither.

Governments are wasting billions of dollars on attempting to predict events that are produced by interdependent systems and are therefore not statistically understandable at the individual level.

I have no large desire to sacrifice much of my personal habits, intellectual pleasures, and personal standards in order to become a billionaire like Warren Buffett, and I certainly do not see point of becoming one if I were to adopt Spartan (even miserly) habits and live in my starter house.

There is something nonphilosophical about investing one's pride and ego into a "my house/ library/ car is bigger than that of others in my category"—it is downright foolish to claim to be first in one's category all the while sitting on a time bomb.

Cherry-picking has optionality: the one telling the story (and publishing it) has the advantage of being able to show the confirmatory examples and completely ignore the rest—and the more volatility and dispersion, the rosier the best story will be (and the darker the worst story). Someone

probability is principally a branch of applied skepticism

True success is exiting some rat race to modulate one's activities for peace of mind

considering that alternative outcomes could have taken place, that the world could have been different, is the core of probabilistic thinking.