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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: September 11
Author
Economist
Essayist
Mathematician
Philosopher
Statistician
University Teacher
Writer
Nassim Nicholas Najib Taleb
Nassim Taleb
Explain
Matters
Asking
Poetry
Science
Matter
Life
Equivalent
Vital

More quotes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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You have family-owned businesses that have been around for 500 years. You cannot name a corporation that survives intact for even a few decades.
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We favor the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated, and the tangible we scorn the abstract.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Economics make homeopath and alternative healers look empirical and scientific.
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Anything that provides you with very, very stable income, very stable conditions, maybe generally stable, that often, it masks real risks, risks of blow-ups.
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I've debated many economists who claim to specialize in risk and probability: when one takes them slightly outside their narrow focus, but within the discipline of probability, they fall apart, with the disconsolate face of a gym rat in front of a gangster hit man.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Education makes the wise slightly wiser, but it makes the fool vastly more dangerous.
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Someone bemoaned that there were so few women in economics. But there are also very few men in economics.
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Modernity: we created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur
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Anything organic requires some dose of variability so it can adapt all the time, and fixing things is not a good idea.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Comfort makes you weaker. We need some variability, some stressors. Not too much, but just enough.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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I always remind myself that what one observes is at best a combination of variance and returns, not just returns.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Simplicity is not so simple to attain.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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While in theory randomness is an intrinsic property, in practice, randomness is incomplete information.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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The person you are most afraid to contradict is yourself.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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The book is the only medium left that hasn't been corrupted by the profane.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once. And someone who has made plenty of errors-though never the same error more than once-is more reliable than someone who has never made any.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Only in recent history has working hard signaled pride rather than shame for lack of talent, finesse and, mostly, sprezzatura .
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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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.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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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.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb