782 Quotes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

This is hard to accept in the age of the Internet. It has been very hard for me to explain that the more data you get, the less you know what’s going on, and the more iatrogenics you will cause. People are still under the illusion that “science” means more data.

History doesn’t crawl; it leaps.

Nobody reads the disclosures that roll down your computer screen. You click ‘I agree’ but you don’t know what you’re agreeing to.

You can define a free person precisely as someone whose fate is not centrally or directly dependent on peer assessment.

The very idea of exercise is to gain from antifragility to workout stressors – as we saw, all kinds of exercise are just exploitations of convexity effects.

The difference between a trader and an investor lies in the duration of the bet, and the corresponding size. There.

Half of the people lie with their lips; the other half with their tears.

I have the fondest memories of time spent in places called ugly, the most boring ones of places called scenic.

The author cites researcher David Howard’s idea of post-traumatic growth. Howard contends that some individuals faced with a traumatic event actually develop new strength.