Quotes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Fathers shall not be put to death because of their children, nor shall children be put to death because of their fathers. Each one shall be put to death for his own sin.

The test of whether you really liked a book is if you reread it (and how many times); the test of whether you really liked someone's company is if you are ready to meet him again and again—the rest is spin, or that variety of sentiment now called self-esteem.

One may have a million ways to explain things, but the true explanation is unique, whether or not it is within our reach.

A complex system, contrary to what people believe, does not require complicated systems and regulations and intricate policies.

Love without sacrifice is like theft.

Yet in practice it is the negative that's used by the pros, those selected by evolution: chess grandmasters usually win by not losing; people become rich by not going bust (particularly when others do); religions are mostly about interdicts; the learning of life is about what to avoid. You reduce most of your personal risks of accident thanks to a small number of measures.

I believe that the principal asset I need to protect and cultivate is my deep-seated intellectual insecurity.

You can replace lies with truth; but myth is only displaced with a narrative.

While the meetings included traders, that is, people who are judged on their numerical performance, it was mostly a forum for salespeople (people capable of charming customers), and the category of entertainers called Wall Street "economists" or "strategists," who make pronouncements on the fate of the markets, but do not engage in any form of risk taking, thus having their success dependent on rhetoric rather than actually testable facts.

for decades doctors never suspected that this "useless" tissue might actually have a use that escaped their detection. The

Patients who spend fifteen minutes every day writing an account of their daily troubles feel indeed better about what has befallen them. You

In a system, the sacrifices of some units—fragile units, that is, or people—are often necessary for the well-being of other units or the whole.

Almost anything around us of significance is hard to grasp linguistically.

The longer one goes without a market trauma, the worse the damage when commotion occurs.

Being an executive does not require very developed frontal lobes, but rather a combination of charisma, a capacity to sustain boredom, and the ability to shallowly perform on harrying schedules.

naïve empiricism, we have a natural tendency to look for instances that confirm our story and our vision of the world—these instances are always easy to find. Alas

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.

The overlap between newspapers was so large that you would get less and less information the more you read. Yet everyone was so eager to become familiar with every fact that they read every freshly printed document and listened to every radio station as if the great answer was going to be revealed to them in the next bulletin. People

A man is morally free when … he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity.

The Procrustean bed in life consists precisely in simplifying the non-linear and making it linear—the simplification that distorts.

I can find confirmation for just about anything, the

For the fragile, the cumulative effect of small shocks is smaller than the single effect of an equivalent single large shock.

Now for reasons that have to do with the increase of the artificial, the move away from ancestral and natural models, and the loss in robustness owing to complications in the design of everything, the role of Black Swans in increasing.

a series of corroborative facts is not necessarily evidence. Seeing