Quotes About Fragility

Expert problems (in which the expert knows a lot but less than he thinks he does) often bring fragilities, and acceptance of ignorance the reverse.

Conversely, when you think you know more than you do, you are fragile (to error).

Alas, it has been hard for me to fit these ideas about fragility and antifragility within the current U.S. political discourse—that beastly two-fossil system. Most of the time, the Democratic side of the U.S. spectrum favors hyper-intervention, unconditional regulation, and large government, while the Republican side loves large corporations, unconditional deregulation, and militarism—both are the same to me here.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

as a patent side effect of mathematics is making people over-optimize and cut corners, causing fragility. Just look how the new is increasingly more perishable than the old.

Traders trade ? traders figure out techniques and products ? academic economists find formulas and claim traders are using them ? new traders believe academics ? blowups (from theory-induced fragility)

the feeling of false stability.

The hidden costs of health care are largely in the denial of antifragility.

Remember from the logic of the barbell that it is necessary to first remove fragilities.

Someone who has seen a house collapse knows only too clearly what frail things little vases of flowers and pictures and white walls are. He knows only too well what a house is made of.

And Ippolito too, in his own way, had been a real person, even though he had come to that insect-like end.

Como somos infelices, queremos ver a nuestro alrededor, por todas partes, escenas trágicas, sangrientas y solemnes, y ya no sabemos celebrar la fragilidad, la delicadeza y la medida.

I got a feeling this whole thing is going to come apart like wet bread.

When our illusion of self-esteem rests on the fragile support of never being challenged, when our insecurity finds evidence of rejection where no rejection exists, then it is only a matter of time until our inner bomb explodes. The form of the explosion is self-destructive behavior—and the fact that one may have an extraordinary intelligence is no protection. Brilliant people with low self-esteem act against their interests every day.

You are partly crazy, and partly imbecile; a ruin, a failure, as almost everybody is,--though some in less degree, or less perceptibly, than their fellows.

a flower of strange beauty, growing in a desolate spot, and blossoming in the wind...

Ideas, which grow up within the imagination and appear so lovely to it and of a value beyond whatever men call valuable, are exposed to be shattered and annihilated by contact with the practical.

Little, impalpable worlds, were those soap-bubbles, with the big world depicted, in hues bright as imagination, on the nothing of their surface.

That pit of blackness that lies beneath us, everywhere ... the firmest substance of human happiness is but a thin crust spread over it, with just reality enough to bear up the illusive stage-scenery amid which we tread. It needs no earthquake to open the chasm.

The links that united her to the rest of human kind - links of flowers, or silk or gold - had all been broken.

a poor, deceived, and half-delirious girl, who, exclaiming that she was the most worthless thing alive or dead, attempted to cast herself into the fire amid all that wrecked and broken trumpery of the world.

No encuentro nada tan singular en la vida como el hecho de que todo parece perder su substancia en el instante en que uno va a tocarlo.

However baby man may brag of his science and skill . . . ," Melville writes in Moby-Dick, "yet for ever and for ever, to the crack of doom the sea will insult and murder him, and pulverize the stateliest, stiffest frigate he can make.

You have to fight for your freedom and for peace. You have to fight for it every day, to keep it. It's like a glass boat; it's easy to break. It's easy to lose. —JOACHIM RØNNEBERG, Gunnerside leader