Nassim Nicholas Taleb

To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week’s newspapers.

What they call “play” (gym, travel, sports) looks like work.

It’s harder to say no when you really mean it.

Asking science to explain life and vital matters is equivalent to asking a grammarian to explain poetry.

Success is becoming in middle adulthood what you dreamed to be in late childhood.

To become a philosopher, start by walking very slowly.

Using, as an excuse, others’ failure of common sense is in itself a failure of common sense.

You want to be yourself, idiosyncratic; the collective (school, rules, jobs, technology) wants you generic to the point of castration.

You have a real life if and only if you do not compete with anyone in any of your pursuits.

For the classics philosophical insight was the product of a life of leisure; for me a life of leisure is the product of philosophical insight.

Charm is the ability to insult people without offending them; nerdiness the reverse.

They are born, put in a box; they go home to live in a box; they study by ticking boxes; they go to what is called “work” in a box, where they sit in their cubicle box; they drive to the grocery store in a box to buy food in a box; they talk about thinking “outside the box”; and when they die they are put in a box.