"Abundance is harder for us to handle than scarcity."
- Nassim Taleb
"Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market alow you to put there."
- Nassim Taleb
"My biggest problem with modernity may lie in the growing separation of the ethical and the legal."
- Nassim Taleb
"This is the tragedy of modernity: as with neurotically overprotective parents, those trying to help are often hurting us the most."
- Nassim Taleb
"I will repeat the following until I am hoarse: it is contagion that determines the fate of a theory in social science, not its validity."
- Nassim Taleb
"To bankrupt a fool, give him information."
- Nassim Taleb
"He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once."
- Nassim Taleb
"Courage is the only virtue you cannot fake."
- Nassim Taleb
"The classical man's worst fear was inglorious death; the modern man's worst fear is just death."
- Nassim Taleb
"The simpler, the better. Complications lead to multiplicative chains of unanticipated effects."
- Nassim Taleb
"If you do not take risks for your opinion, you are nothing."
- Nassim Taleb
"Work destroys your soul by stealthily invading your brain during the hours not officially spent working; be selective about professions."
- Nassim Taleb
"We are quick to forget that just being alive is an extraordinary piece of good luck, a remote event, a chance occurrence of monstrous proportions."
- Nassim Taleb
"Bureaucracy is a construction by which a person is conveniently separated from the consequences of his or her actions."
- Nassim Taleb
"A good book gets better at the second reading. A great book at the third. Any book not worth rereading isn't worth reading."
- Nassim Taleb
"My best definition of a nerd: someone who asks you to explain an aphorism"
- Nassim Taleb
"A Stoic is a Buddhist with attitude, one who says “f*** you” to fate."
- Nassim Taleb
"Mild success can be explainable by skills and labor. Wild success is attributable to variance."
- Nassim Taleb
"How much you truly “believe” in something can be manifested only through what you are willing to risk for it."