“The general principle of antifragility: it is much better to do things you cannot explain than explain things you cannot do.”

—Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

“The first, and hardest, step to wisdom: avert the standard assumption that people know what they want.”

—Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

“If you want people to like you, do not give them advice. Ask them for advice.”

—Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

“Trust those who are greedy for money a thousand times more than those who are greedy for credentials.” —Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

‘Behavioral economics can be summarized as follows: “humans are idiots”.
My message: “Maybe, but behavioral economists are most certainly idiots”.‘

—Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

“You will get the most attention from those who hate you. No friend, no admirer and no partner will flatter you with as much curiosity.”
—Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

“The rationalist imagines an imbecile-free society; the empiricist an imbecile-proof one, or even better, a rationalist-proof one.” — Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

“The Roman army did not employ slaves (except during one Punic war). Only the free can fight.” – Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

“There is no more unmistakable sign of failure than that of a middle-aged man boasting of his successes in college.”

—Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

“We need to feel a little bit lost somewhere, physically or intellectually, at least once a day.” – Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

“The central idea in The Black Swan is that: rare events cannot be estimated from empirical observation since they are rare.”
—Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

“Never ask anyone for their opinion, forecast, or recommendation. Just ask them what they have—or don’t have—in their portfolio.”

—Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

‘Someone who says “I am busy” is either declaring incompetence (and lack of control of his life) or trying to get rid of you.’

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

“If you have earned your self-respect, respect by others is a luxury; if you haven’t, respect by others is a necessity.”
—Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

“The sucker overestimates the value of secret information when the important stuff is that huge elephant in front if us all.”

—Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

“We know from chaos theory that even if you had a perfect model of the world, you’d need infinite precision in order to predict future events. With sociopolitical or economic phenomena, we don’t have anything like that.”
—Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

“Charm is the ability to insult people without offending them; nerdiness the reverse.”
—Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

“Complaints don’t deliver complaints, they mostly reveal your weakness.”

—Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

‘I disagree with the followers of Marx and those of Adam Smith: the reason free markets work is because they allow people to be lucky, thanks to aggressive trial and error, not by giving rewards or “incentives” for skill.’
—Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

“The grandchildren should not bear the debts of the grandparents.”
—Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

“When you ask people, ‘What’s the opposite of fragile?,’ they tend to say robust, resilient, adaptable, solid, strong. That’s not it. The opposite of fragile is something that gains from disorder.”
—Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

“We favor the sensational and the extremely visible. This affects the way we judge heroes. There is little room in our consciousness for heroes who do not deliver visible resultsor those heroes who focus on process rather than results.”
—-Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

“I have the fondest memories of time spent in places called ugly, the most boring ones of places called scenic.” – Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

“He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once. And someone who has made plenty of errors though never the same error more than once is more reliable than someone who has never made any.”
—Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

“The market is like a large movie theater with a small door. And the best way to detect a sucker is to see if his focus is on the size of the theater rather than that of the door.” – Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

“I write only if I feel like it and only on a subject I feel like writing about and the reader is no fool.”
—Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

“It is no secret that large corporations prefer people with families; those with downside risk are easier to own, particularly when they are choking under a large mortgage.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

“The rationalist imagines an imbecile-free society; the empiricist and imbecile-proof one, or even better, a rationalist-proof one.” – Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

“The curse of modernity is that we are increasingly populated by a class of people who are better at explaining than understanding, or better at explaining than doing.”

—Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

“Let us say that, in general, failure (and disconfirmation) are more informative than success and confirmation, which is why I claim that negative knowledge is just more robust.”
—Nassim Nicholas Taleb.