Antifragile

Much of aging comes from a misunderstanding of the effect of comfort.

When some systems are stuck in a dangerous impasse, randomness and only randomness can unlock them and set them free.

There is no such thing as a failed soldier, dead or alive (unless he acted in a cowardly manner)—likewise there is no such thing as a failed entrepreneur or failed scientific researcher ...

It is all about redundancy. Nature likes to overinsure itself.

I want to live happily in a world I don't understand.

Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility.

An option hides where we don't want it to hide.

The fragile wants tranquility, the antifragile grows from disorder, and the robust doesn't care too much.

It is painful to think about ruthlessness as an engine of improvement.

This is the central illusion in life: that randomness is a risk, that it is a bad thing ...

Compromising is condoning. The only modern dictum I follow one by George Santayana: A man is morally free when... he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity. This is not just an aim but an obligation.

If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud.

Randomness works well in search—sometimes better than humans.

A man is honorable in proportion to the personal risks he takes for his opinion.

He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once.

If I could predict what my day would exactly look like, I would feel a little bit dead.

Modernity has replaced ethics with legalese.

I suppose that the main benefit of being rich (over just being independent) is to be able to despise rich people (a good concentration of whom you find in glitzy ski resorts) without any sour grapes. It is even sweeter when these farts don't know that you are richer than they are.

Our greatest asset is the one we distrust the most: the built-in antifragility of certain risk-taking systems.

It is often the mistakes of others that benefit the rest of us—and, sadly, not them ... For the antifragile, harm from errors should be less than the benefits.

The best way to learn a language may be an episode of jail in a foreign country.

We didn't get where we are thanks to the sissy notion of resilience.

What is nonmeasurable and nonpredictable will remain nonmeasurable and nonpredictable ... no matter how much hate mail I get.

[A] theory is a very dangerous thing to have.

Simplicity is not so simple to attain.

Just as being nice to the arrogant is no better than being arrogant toward the nice; being accommodating toward anyone committing a nefarious action condones it.

Daily news and sugar confuse our system in the same manner.

My idea of the modern Stoic sage is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into information, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking.

Half of life—the interesting half of life—we don't even have a name for.

The worst side effect of wealth is the social associations it forces on its victims, as people with big houses end up socializing with other people with big houses.

Information is antifragile; it feeds more on attempts to harm it than it does on efforts to promote it.

The antifragility of the higher level may require the fragility—and sacrifice—of the lower one.

Much of modern life is preventable chronic stress injury.

If humans fight the last war, nature fights the next one.

Modernity widened the distance between the sensational and the relevant.

Injecting some confusion stabilizes the system.