Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Lebanese-American essayist, scholar and statistician
1960 —

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You will never fully convince someone that he is wrong; only reality can.

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If your private life conflicts with your intellectual opinion, it cancels your intellectual ideas, not your private life.

Only evolution knows if the "wrong" thing is really wrong.

Learning is rooted in repetition [...], meaning that the reading of a single text twice is more profitable than reading two different things once, provided of course that said text has some depth of content.

Individuals don`t need to know where they are going; markets do. Leave people alone under a good structure and they will take care of things.

It is much easier to do business with the owner of the business than some employee who is likely to lose his job next year; likewise it is easier to trust the word of an autocrat than a fragile elected official.

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If you hear advice from a grandmother or elders, odds are that it works 90 percent of the time. On the other hand [...] if you read anything by psychologists and behavioral scientists, odds are that it works at less than 10 percent, unless it is has also been covered by the grandmother and the classics, in which case why would you need a psychologist?

Those who engage in smear campaigning as a profession are necessarily incompetent at everything else - hence at that business too.

The principal thing you can learn from a professor is how to be a professor - and the chief thing you can learn from, say, a life coach or inspirational speaker is how to become a life coach or inspirational speaker.

We are only truly alive in those moments when we improvise; no schedule, just small surprises and stimuli from the environment.

Technology is at its best when it is invisible.

Writers are remembered for their best work, politicians for their worst mistakes, and businessmen are almost never remembered.

Your reputation is harmed the most by what you say to defend it.

The only objective definition of aging is when a person starts to talk about aging.

If you want people to read a book, tell them it is overrated.

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