Nassim Nicholas Taleb Zitate

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„Sie sind nur dann reich, wenn Geld, das Sie ablehnen, besser schmeckt als Geld, das Sie annehmen.“

„Die Hälfte der Menschen lügt mit den Lippen; die andere Hälfte mit ihren Tränen.“

„Die Menschen trugen gewöhnliche Kleidung wochentags und am Sonntag formelle Kleidung. Heute ist es genau umgekehrt.“

„Sie haben ein echtes Leben, wenn Sie mit niemandem in einem Ihrer Bestrebungen konkurrieren.“

„Was Dummköpfe als „Zeitverschwendung“ bezeichnen, ist meistens die beste Investition.“

„Es ist die Schwierigkeit, die das Genie in uns wecken.“

“An idea starts to be interesting when you get scared of taking it to its logical conclusion.”

“I always remind myself that what one observes is at best a combination of variance and returns, not just returns.”

“Only Ponzi schemes should depend on confidence. Governments should never need to “restore confidence.” Cascading rumours are a product of complex systems. Governments cannot stop the rumours. Simply, we need to be in a position to shrug off rumours, be robust in the face of them.”

“When some systems are stuck in a dangerous impasse, randomness and only randomness can unlock them and set them free.”

“Mental clarity is the child of courage, not the other way around.”

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

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

“A man is morally free when… he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity. This is not just an aim but an obligation.”

“This makes living in big cities invaluable because you increase the odds of serendipitous encounters — you gain exposure to the envelope of serendipity.”

“The same past data can confirm a theory and its exact opposite! If you survive until tomorrow, it could mean that either a) you are more likely to be immortal or b) that you are closer to death.”

“When conflicted between two choices, take neither.”

“We learn the most from fools … yet we pay them back with the worst ingratitude.”

“I try to make money infrequently, as infrequently as possible simply because I believe that rare events are not fairly valued, and that the rarer the event, the more undervalued it will be in price.”

“Unlike a well-defined, precise game like Russian roulette, where the risks are visible to anyone capable of multiplying and dividing by six, one does not observe the barrel of reality.”

“Ethical man accords his profession to his beliefs, instead of according his beliefs to his profession.”

“People used to wear ordinary clothes weekdays, and formal attire on Sunday. Today it is the exact reverse.”

“Modernity needs to understand that being rich and becoming rich are not mathematically, personally, socially, and ethically the same thing.”

“[E]conomists are evaluated on how intelligent they sound, not on a scientific measure of their knowledge of reality.”

“It is painful to think about ruthlessness as an engine of improvement.”

“The book is the only medium left that hasn’t been corrupted by the profane.”

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

“If I could predict what my day would exactly look like, I would feel a little bit dead.”

“History is opaque. You see what comes out, not the script that produces events, […] The generator of historical events is different from the events themselves, much as the minds of the gods cannot be read just by witnessing their deeds.”

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

“The weak shows his strength and hides his weaknesses; the magnificent exhibits his weaknesses like ornaments.”

“I suppose that the main benefit of being rich (over just being independent) is to be able to despise rich people (a good concentration of whom you find in glitzy ski resorts) without any sour grapes. It is even sweeter when these farts don't know that you are richer than they are.”

“The more data we have, the more likely we are to drown in it.”

“[A] theory is a very dangerous thing to have.”

“Probability is not about the odds, but about the belief in the existence of an alternative outcome, cause, or motive.”