Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The twentieth century was the bankruptcy of the social utopia; the twenty-first will be that of the technological one.

It takes extraordinary wisdom and self-control to accept that many things have a logic we do not understand that is smarter than our own.

Older people are most beautiful when they have what is lacking in the young: poise, , wisdom, , and this post-heroic absence of agitation.

Restaurants get you in with food to sell you liquor; religions get you in with belief to sell you rules.

For the robust, an error is information.

Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love.

Intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant.

Greatness starts with the replacement of hatred with polite disdain.

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

Hard science gives sensational results with a horribly boring process; philosophy gives boring results with a sensational process; literature gives sensational results with a sensational process; and economics gives boring results with a boring process.

Because our minds need to reduce information, we are more likely to try to squeeze a phenomenon into the Procrustean bed of a crisp and known category (amputating the unknown), rather than suspend categorization, and make it tangible. Thanks to our detections of false patterns, along with real ones, what is random will appear less random and more certain—our overactive brains are more likely to impose the wrong, simplistic, narrative than no narrative at all.

Just as dyed hair makes older men less attractive, it is what you do to hide your weaknesses that makes them repugnant.