The quotations of

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Lebanese-American mathematical statistician, option trader, risk analyst and author

born 1960

24 quotes, most often on Clever Jabs, Risk and Knowledge.

The weak shows his strength and hides his weaknesses; the magnificent exhibits his weaknesses like ornaments.
The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 94
- Character
Social science means inventing a certain brand of human we can understand.
The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 95
- Clever Jabs
- Science
An idea starts to be interesting when you get scared of taking it to its logical conclusion.
The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 3
- Ideas
Forecasting by bureaucrats tends to be used for anxiety relief rather than for adequate policy making.
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007), p. 162
- Government
The twentieth century was the bankruptcy of the social utopia; the twenty-first will be that of the technological one.
The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 31
- History
- Technology
It takes extraordinary wisdom and self-control to accept that many things have a logic we do not understand that is smarter than our own.
The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 78
- Wisdom
Older people are most beautiful when they have what is lacking in the young: poise, erudition, wisdom, phronesis, and this post-heroic absence of agitation.
The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 24
- Age
- Beauty
My idea of the modern Stoic sage is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into information, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking.
Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (2012), p. 156
- Philosophy
- Wisdom
You exist if and only if you are free to do things without a visible objective, with no justification and, above all, outside the dictatorship of someone else’s narrative.
The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 17
- Freedom
For the robust, an error is information.
The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 72
- Failure
When conflicted between two choices, take neither.
The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 71
- Decisions
While in theory randomness is an intrinsic property, in practice, randomness is incomplete information.
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007), p. 198
- Knowledge
- Luck
Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love.
The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 4
Procrastination is the soul rebelling against entrapment.
The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 8
- Time
- Work
Intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant.
The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 78
- Intelligence

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