Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Preoccupation with efficacy is the main obstacle to a poetic, elegant, robust and heroic life.

Modernity: we created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur.

You are rich if and only if money you refuse tastes better than money you accept.

When we want to do something while unconsciously certain to fail, we seek advice so we can blame someone else for the failure.

The fool generalizes the particular; the nerd particularizes the general; ... the wise does neither.

What fools call “wasting time” is most often the best investment.

The difference between slaves in Roman and Ottoman days and today’s employees is that slaves did not need to flatter their boss.

The sucker’s trap is when you focus on what you know and what others don’t know, rather than the reverse.

The best test of whether someone is extremely stupid (or extremely wise) is whether financial and political news makes sense to him.

There is a certain category of fool—the overeducated, the academic, the journalist, the newspaper reader, the mechanistic "scientist", the pseudo-empiricist, those endowed with what I call "epistemic arrogance", this wonderful ability to discount what they did not see, the unobserved.

Decomposition, for most, starts when they leave the free, social, and uncorrupted college life for the solitary confinement of professions and nuclear families.

Read nothing from the past one hundred years; eat no fruits from the past one thousand years; drink nothing from the past four thousand years (just wine and water); but talk to no ordinary man over forty.