"Missing a train is only painful if you run after it! Likewise, not matching the idea of success others expect from you is only painful if that’s what you are seeking."
- Nassim Taleb
"A Stoic is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into transformation, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking."
- Nassim Taleb
"Charm is the ability to insult people without offending them; nerdiness the reverse"
- 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."