782 Quotes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Much of modern life is preventable chronic stress injury.

Karl Marx, a visionary, figured out that you can control a slave much better by convincing him he is an employee.

I don't read the papers; I stopped reading the papers. I read the papers only during periods of crisis, and I think papers are too long on a regular day and too short days when we have a crisis.

While in theory randomness is an intrinsic property, in practice, randomness is incomplete information.

An elephant is vastly more efficient, metabolically, than a mouse. It's the same for a megacity as opposed to a village. But an elephant can break a leg very easily, whereas you can toss a mouse out of a window and it'll be fine. Size makes you fragile.

A Stoic is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into transformation, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking.

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.

Writing is the art of repeating oneself without anyone noticing.

What fools call "wasting time" is most often the best investment.