782 Quotes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Half of life – the interesting half of life – we don’t have a name for.

When you walk the walk, whether successful or not, you feel more indifferent and robust to people’s opinion, freer, more real.

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.

One Thousand And One Days, or How Not to Be a Sucker.

Many people labor in life under the impression that they are doing something right, yet they may not show solid results for a long time. They need a capacity for continuously adjourned gratification to survive a steady diet of peer cruelty without becoming demoralized.

What Erasmus called ingratitudo vulgi, the ingratitude of the masses, is increasing in the age of globalization and the Internet.

One may have a million ways to explain things, but the true explanation is unique, whether or not it is within our reach.

The market is like a large movie theater with a small door. And the best way to detect a sucker is to see if his focus is on the size of the theater rather than that of the door.

But the worst touristification is the life we moderns have to lead in captivity, during our leisure hours: Friday night opera, scheduled parties, scheduled laughs. Again, golden jail. This “goal-driven” attitude hurts deeply inside my existential self.