"They will envy you for your success, your wealth, for your intelligence, for your looks, for your status - but rarely for your wisdom."
- Nassim Taleb
"I should like to bury something precious in every place where I've been happy and then, when I'm old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember."
- Evelyn Waugh
"A man is known by his heroes."
- Benoit Mandelbrot
"Animals hear about death for the first time when they die."
- Arthur Schopenhauer
"One should use common words to say uncommon things."
- Arthur Schopenhauer
"People focus on role models; it is more effective to find antimodels - people you don't want to resemble when you grow up"
- Nassim Taleb
"The best way to measure the loss of intellectual sophistication - this "nerdification," to put it bluntly - is in the growing disappearance of sarcasm, as mechanic minds take insults a bit too literally."
- Nassim Taleb
"It is my great hope someday, to see science and decision makers rediscover what the ancients have always known. Namely that our highest currency is respect."
- Nassim Taleb
"A prophet is not someone with special visions, just someone blind to most of what others see"
- Nassim Taleb
"Mostly it is loss which teaches us about the worth of things."