"A Stoic is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into transformation, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking."
- Nassim Taleb
"It has been more profitable for us to bind together in the wrong direction than to be alone in the right one. Those who have followed the assertive idiot rather than the introspective wise person have passed us some of their genes. This is apparent from a social pathology: psychopaths rally followers."
- Nassim Taleb
"Half of the people lie with their lips; the other half with their tears"
- Nassim Taleb
"The psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has a simple heuristic. Never ask the doctor what you should do. Ask him what he would do if he were in your place. You would be surprised at the difference"
- Nassim Taleb
"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 Taleb
"Heroes are heroes because they are heroic in behavior, not because they won or lost."
- Nassim Taleb
"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 Taleb
"What I learned on my own I still remember"
- Nassim Taleb
"The difference between technology and slavery is that slaves are fully aware that they are not free"
- Nassim Taleb
"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
"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
"You may never know what type of person someone is unless they are given opportunities to violate moral or ethical codes."
- Nassim Taleb
"The problem with experts is that they do not know what they do not know."
- Nassim Taleb
"Suckers try to win arguments, nonsuckers try to win."
- Nassim Taleb
"The curse of modernity is that we are increasingly populated by a class of people who are better at explaining than understanding, or better at explaining than doing."
- Nassim Taleb
"The irony of the process of thought control: the more energy you put into trying to control your ideas and what you think about, the more your ideas end up controlling you."
- Nassim Taleb
"Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love; close enough on the surface but, to the nonsucker, not exactly the same thing."
- Nassim Taleb
"Modernity: we created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur."