Nassim Taleb is a world-renowned writer, philosopher, and statistician. He’s also something of an enigma. In addition to being the author of best-selling books like The Black Swan and Antifragile, he’s also a former hedge fund manager and derivatives trader.
So what does this modern day renaissance man have to say about life? Keep reading to find out in this blog post where we’ve compiled 70 of his most insightful observations.
Nassim Taleb Quotes
[A flaneur is] someone who, unlike a tourist, makes a decision opportunistically at every step to revise his schedule (or his destination) so he can imbibe things based on new information obtained.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Love without sacrifice is like theft.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
It has been more profitable for us to bind together in the wrong direction than to be alone in the right one. Those who have followed the assertive idiot rather than the introspective wise person have passed us some of their genes. This is apparent from a social pathology: psychopaths rally followers.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Charm is the ability to insult people without offending them; nerdiness the reverse.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore, professore dottore Eco, what a library you have ! How many of these books have you read?” and the others – a very small minority – who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you don’t know as your financial means, mortgage rates and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menancingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Missing a train is only painful if you run after it! Likewise, not matching the idea of success others expect from you is only painful if that’s what you are seeking.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Half of the people lie with their lips; the other half with their tears.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
When you develop your opinions on the basis of weak evidence, you will have difficulty interpreting subsequent information that contradicts these opinions, even if this new information is obviously more accurate.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Heroes are heroes because they are heroic in behavior, not because they won or lost.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
A Stoic is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into transformation, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
What I learned on my own I still remember.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
If you want to annoy a poet, explain his poetry.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Things always become obvious after the fact.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
They will envy you for your success, your wealth, for your intelligence, for your looks, for your status – but rarely for your wisdom.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Freedom is always associated with risk taking, whether it leads to it or comes from it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
People focus on role models; it is more effective to find antimodels – people you don’t want to resemble when you grow up.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
They think that intelligence is about noticing things are relevant (detecting patterns); in a complex world, intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant (avoiding false patterns).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Remember that you are a Black Swan.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility; it results from some ecological or naturalistic wisdom, and is not always bad — at an existential level, it is my body rebelling against its entrapment. It is my soul fighting the Procrustean bed of modernity.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The best way to measure the loss of intellectual sophistication – this “nerdification,” to put it bluntly – is in the growing disappearance of sarcasm, as mechanic minds take insults a bit too literally.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
When you develop your opinions on the basis of weak evidence, you will have difficulty interpreting subsequent information that contradicts these opinions, even if this new information is obviously more accurate.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
It is my great hope someday, to see science and decision makers rediscover what the ancients have always known. Namely that our highest currency is respect.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
A prophet is not someone with special visions, just someone blind to most of what others see.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
If you have more than one reason to do something (choose a doctor or veterinarian, hire a gardener or an employee, marry a person, go on a trip), just don’t do it. It does not mean that one reason is better than two, just that by invoking more than one reason you are trying to convince yourself to do something. Obvious decisions (robust to error) require no more than a single reason.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
If there is something in nature you don’t understand, odds are it makes sense in a deeper way that is beyond your understanding. So there is a logic to natural things that is much superior to our own. Just as there is a dichotomy in law: ‘innocent until proven guilty’ as opposed to ‘guilty until proven innocent’, let me express my rule as follows: what Mother Nature does is rigorous until proven otherwise; what humans and science do is flawed until proven otherwise.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Avoid losers. If you hear someone use the words ‘impossible’, ‘never’, ‘too difficult’ too often, drop him or her from your social network.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
They think that intelligence is about noticing things are relevant (detecting patterns); in a complex world, intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant (avoiding false patterns).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The difference between technology and slavery is that slaves are fully aware that they are not free.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The curious mind embraces science; the gifted and sensitive, the arts; the practical, business; the leftover becomes an economist.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
If you take risks and face your fate with dignity, there is nothing you can do that makes you small; if you don’t take risks, there is nothing you can do that makes you grand, nothing.
Nassim NicholasTaleb
Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg didn’t finish college. Too much emphasis is placed on formal education – I told my children not to worry about their grades but to enjoy learning.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
I select a very small number of things to be sceptical about, such as markets, and on these I am hypersceptic. But I want to be fooled by randomness in art. I want the ceremonial of religion; we are made for it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
You may not know in your mind where you are going, but you know it by doing.
Nassim Taleb
We have this culture of financialization. People think they need to make money with their savings rather with their own business. So you end up with dentists who are more traders than dentists. A dentist should drill teeth and use whatever he does in the stock market for entertainment.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
If you are an Arabic-speaking, Greek-Orthodox going to a French school it makes you deeply sceptical if you have to listen to three different accounts of the Crusades – one from the Muslim side, one from the Greek side and one from the Catholic side.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Nature builds things that are antifragile. In the case of evolution, nature uses disorder to grow stronger. Occasional starvation or going to the gym also makes you stronger, because you subject your body to stressors and gain from them.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Doctors most commonly get mixed up between absence of evidence and evidence of absense.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Difficulty is what wakes up the genius.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The complex world, the notion of ’cause’ itself is suspect; it is either nearly impossible to detect or not really defined—another reason to ignore newspapers, with their constant supply of causes for things.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Religion isn’t so much about telling man that there is one God as about preventing man from thinking that he is God.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
When you ask people, ‘What’s the opposite of fragile?,’ they tend to say robust, resilient, adaptable, solid, strong. That’s not it. The opposite of fragile is something that gains from disorder.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
This is the tragedy of modernity: as with neurotically overprotective parents, those trying to help are often hurting us the most.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Medieval man was a cog in a wheel he did not understand; modern man is a cog in a complicated system he thinks he understands.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
I will repeat the following until I am hoarse: it is contagion that determines the fate of a theory in social science, not its validity.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
People have the problem of denial. This is one of the things I learned in Lebanon. Everybody who left Beirut when the war started, including my parents, said, ‘Oh, its temporary.’ It lasted 17 years! People tend to underestimate the gravity of these situations. That’s how they work.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
True humility is when you can surprise yourself more than others; the rest is either shyness or good marketing.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The fragile wants tranquility, the antifragile grows from disorder, and the robust doesn’t care too much.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
If you want to get an idea of a friend’s temperament, ethics, and personal elegance, you need to look at him under the tests of severe circumstances, not under the regular rosy glow of daily life.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The imagination of the genius vastly surpasses his intellect; the intellect of the academic vastly surpasses his imagination.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
When you write, you don’t have the social constraints of having people in front of you, so you talk about abstract matters.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
In social policy, when we provide a safety net, it should be designed to help people take more entrepreneurial risks, not to turn them into dependents. This doesn’t mean that we should be callous to the underprivileged.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The knowledge we get by tinkering, via trial and error, experience, and the workings of time, in other words, contact with the earth, is vastly superior to that obtained through reasoning, something self-serving institutions have been very busy hiding from us.
Nassim NicholasTaleb
I no longer care about the financial system. I gave them my roadmap. OK? Thanks, bye. I’ve no idea what’s going on. I’m disconnected. I’m totally disengaged.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Answer e-mails from junior people before more senior ones. Junior people have further to go and tend to remember who slighted them.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
We know from chaos theory that even if you had a perfect model of the world, you’d need infinite precision in order to predict future events. With sociopolitical or economic phenomena, we don’t have anything like that.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
If you hear a “prominent” economist using the word ‘equilibrium,’ or ‘normal distribution,’ do not argue with him; just ignore him, or try to put a rat down his shirt.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility; it results from some ecological or naturalistic wisdom, and is not always bad — at an existential level, it is my body rebelling against its entrapment. It is my soul fighting the Procrustean bed of modernity.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
It’s not a good idea to take a forecast from someone wearing a tie. If possible, tease people who take themselves and their knowledge too seriously.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
It is no secret that large corporations prefer people with a family; those with downside risk are easier to own, particularly when they are choking under a large mortgage.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
When you walk the walk, whether successful or not, you feel more indifferent and robust to people’s opinion, freer, more real.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
We should probably stop trading derivatives, anything more complex than regular options … I am an options trader, and I don’t understand options. How do you want a regulator to understand them?.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Practitioners are usually too busy practitioning to write books, articles, papers, speeches, equations, theories and get honored by Highly Constipated and Honorable Members of Academies).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
By definition, what works cannot be irrational; about every single person I know who has chronically failed in business shares that mental block, the failure to realize that if something stupid works (and makes money), it cannot be stupid.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
My lesson from Soros is to start every meeting at my boutique by convincing everyone that we are a bunch of idiots who know nothing and are mistake-prone, but happen to be endowed with the rare privilege of knowing it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
A Final Word
Nassim Taleb is a fascinating thinker and true flaneur with plenty of wisdom to share on life, wealth and becoming antifragile.
Have any other Nassim Taleb quotes you’d add to the list? Which is your favorite? Leave us a comment below – we’d love to hear from you.
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