"Doctors most commonly get mixed up between absence of evidence and evidence of abense"
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Quote collection
Nassim Nicholas Taleb quotes (page 1 of 18)
342 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary."
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"A Stoic is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into transformation, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking."
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"For many people, commuting is the worst part of the day, and policies that can make commuting shorter and more convenient would be a straightforward way to reduce minor but widespread suffering."
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"Decomposition, for most, starts when they leave the free, social, and uncorrupted college life for the solitary confinement of professions and nuclear families."
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"People used to wear ordinary clothes weekdays, and formal attire on Sunday. Today it is the exact reverse."
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"Democracies can't handle austerity measures very well."
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"They are born, put in a box; they go home to live in a box; they study by ticking boxes; they go to what is called "work" in a box, where they sit in their cubicle box; they drive to the grocery store in a box to buy food in a box; they talk about thinking "outside the box"; and when they die they are put in a box."
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"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."
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"Love without sacrifice is like theft"
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"Someone bemoaned that there were so few women in economics. But there are also very few men in economics."
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"Avoid losers. If you hear someone use the words 'impossible', 'never', 'too difficult' too often, drop him or her from your social network."
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"Someone who says "I am busy" is either declaring incompetence (and lack of control of his life) or trying to get rid of you."
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"Karl Marx, a visionary, figured out that you can control a slave much better by convincing him he is an employee."
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"Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg didn't finish college. Too much emphasis is placed on formal education - I told my children not to worry about their grades but to enjoy learning."
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"If there is something in nature you don't understand, odds are it makes sense in a deeper way that is beyond your understanding. So there is a logic to natural things that is much superior to our own. Just as there is a dichotomy in law: 'innocent until proven guilty' as opposed to 'guilty until proven innocent', let me express my rule as follows: what Mother Nature does is rigorous until proven otherwise; what humans and science do is flawed until proven otherwise."
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"If you have more than one reason to do something (choose a doctor or veterinarian, hire a gardener or an employee, marry a person, go on a trip), just don’t do it. It does not mean that one reason is better than two, just that by invoking more than one reason you are trying to convince yourself to do something. Obvious decisions (robust to error) require no more than a single reason."
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"A competitive athlete is painful to look at; trying hard to become an animal rather than a man, he will never be as fast as a cheetah or as strong as an ox."
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"Your reputation is harmed the most by what you say to defend it."
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"Umberto Eco is the owner of a large personal library of almost 30,000 books that he has not read. [To him] read books are far less valuable than unread ones."
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