Quote collection
342 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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."
"If you sat with a pencil and jotted down all the decisions you've taken in the past week, or, if you could, over your lifetime, you would realize that almost all of them have had asymmetric payoff, with one side carrying a larger consequence than the other. You decide principally based on fragility, not probability. Or to rephrase, You decide principally based on fragility, not so much on True/False."
"The fragile wants tranquility, the antifragile grows from disorder, and the robust doesn't care too much."
"Don't ask the barber whether you need a haircut, and don't ask an academic if what he does is relevant."
"Suckers try to win arguments, nonsuckers try to win."
"I always remind myself that what one observes is at best a combination of variance and returns, not just returns."
"Randomness works well in search sometimes better than humans."
"Muscles without strength, friendship without trust, opinion without risk, change without aesthetics, age without values, food without nourishment, power without fairness, facts without rigor, degrees without erudition, militarism without fortitude, progress without civilization, complication without depth, fluency without content; these are the sins to remember."
"The only valid political system is one that can handle an imbecile in power without suffering from it"
"You don't become completely free by just avoiding being a slave; you also need to avoid becoming a master."
"Those who do not think that employment is systemic slavery are either blind or employed."
"Paul Krugman is a danger to society!"
"Stoicism is about the *domestication* of emotions, not their elimination."
"By setting oneself totally free of constraints, free of thoughts, free of this debilitating activity called work, free of efforts, elements hidden in the texture of reality start staring at you; then mysteries that you never thought existed emerge in front of your eyes."
"The sucker's trap is when you focus on what you know and what others don't know, rather than the reverse."
"An option hides where we don't want it to hide."
"The classical man's worst fear was inglorious death; the modern man's worst fear is just death"
"There is no effective difference between guessing a variable that is not random, but for which information is partial or deficient, and a random one. In this sense, guessing (what I don't know, but what someone else may know) and predicting (what has not taken place yet) are the same thing."
"I have respect for mother nature's methods of robustness (billions of years allow most of what is fragile to break); classical thought is more robust (in its respect for the unknown, the epistemic humility) than the modern post-Enlightenment naïve pseudoscientific autism. Thus my classical values make me advocate the triplet of erudition, elegance, and courage; against modernity's phoniness, nerdiness and philistinism"
"I remind myself of Einstein's remark that common sense is nothing but a collection of misconceptions acquired by age 18."