Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes and Sayings - Page 1

“Doctors most commonly get mixed up between absence of evidence and evidence of abense”
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Doctors #Absence #Evidence

“Someone bemoaned that there were so few women in economics. But there are also very few men in economics.”
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Men #Economics

“Love without sacrifice is like theft”
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#True Love #Sacrifice #Theft

“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

#Motivational #Use #Impossible

“Your reputation is harmed the most by what you say to defend it.”
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Reputation

“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

#Jobs #Children #College

“People are much less interested in what you are trying to show them than what you are trying to hide.”
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#People #Trying #Shows

“A Stoic is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into transformation, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking.”
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Pain #Mistake #Desire

“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

#Running #Ideas #Missing

“Banking is a very treacherous business because you don't realize it is risky until it is too late. It is like calm waters that deliver huge storms.”
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Water #Storm #Banking

“The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.”
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Motivational #Work #Creativity

“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

#Information #Opinion #Weak

“What I learned on my own I still remember”
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Remember #Stills

“Karl Marx, a visionary, figured out that you can control a slave much better by convincing him he is an employee.”
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Visionaries #Slave #Employee

“Meditation is a way to be narcissistic without hurting anyone”
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Hurt #Meditation #Way

“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

#Procrastination #Exercise #Fighting

“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

#Mother #Odds #Law

“You get pseudo-order when you seek order; you only get a measure of order and control when you embrace randomness.”
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Order #Pseudo #Embrace

“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

#Leadership #Senior #People

“The classical man's worst fear was inglorious death; the modern man's worst fear is just death”
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Fear #Men #Modern

“Things always become obvious after the fact”
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Facts #Obvious

“If you want to annoy a poet, explain his poetry.”
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Poetry #Want #Annoying

“The Internet allows the small guy a global marketplace. But technology is harmful in the sense that we get too much information from it. Because of the web we get 10 times the amount of noise we ever got, which makes harmful fallacies far more likely.”
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Technology #Guy #Noise

“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

#Order #Perfect #World

“If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud.”
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Fraud

“The difference between technology and slavery is that slaves are fully aware that they are not free”
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Technology #Differences #Slavery

“Half of the people lie with their lips; the other half with their tears”
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Lying #People #Tears

“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

#Trying #Rats #Normal

“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

#War #Years #People

“The inability to predict outliers implies the inability to predict the course of history”
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#Inability #Outliers