"You will be civilized on the day you can spend a long period doing nothing, learning nothing, and improving nothing, without feeling the slightest amount of guilt."
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Quote collection
Nassim Nicholas Taleb quotes (page 6 of 18)
342 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"For the robust, an error is information."
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"Things always become obvious after the fact"
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"Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better."
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"We tend to treat our knowledge as personal property to be protected and defended. It is an ornament that allows us to rise in the pecking order. [...] We take what we know a little too seriously."
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"What fools call "wasting time" is most often the best investment."
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"Simplicity is not so simple to attain."
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"Suckers think that you cure greed with money, addiction with substances, expert problems with experts, banking with bankers, economics with economists, and debt crises with debt spending"
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"This is the central illusion in life: that randomness is a risk, that it is a bad thing."
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"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."
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"When an investor focuses on short-term investments, he or she is observing the variability of the portfolio, not the returns - in short, being fooled by randomness."
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"Experience is devoid of the cherry-picking that we find in studies."
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"The weak shows his strength and hides his weaknesses; the magnificent exhibits his weaknesses like ornaments."
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"Modernity: we created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur"
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"We glorify those who left their names in history books at the expense of those contributors about whom our books are silent. We humans are not just a superficial race - we are a very unfair one."
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"Wear your best for your execution and stand dignified. Your last recourse against randomness is how you act - if you can't control outcomes, you can control the elegance of your behaviour. You will always have the last word."
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"Many people keep deploring the low level of formal education in the United states (as defined by, say, math grades). Yet these fail to realize that the new comes from here and gets imitated elsewhere. And it is not thanks to universities, which obviously claim a lot more credit than their accomplishments warrant. Like Britain in the Industrial Revolution, America's asset is, simply, risk taking and the use of optionality, this remarkable ability to engage in rational forms fo trial and error, with no comparative shame in failing again, starting again, and repeating failure."
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"The fool generalizes the particular; the nerd particularizes the general; some do both; and the wise does neither"
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"Let me be more aggressive: we are largely better at doing than we are at thinking, thanks to antifragility. I’d rather be dumb and antifragile than extremely smart and fragile, any time."
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"It might be useful to be able to predict war. But tension does not necessarily lead to war, but often to peace and to denouement."
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