Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
When you write, you don't have the social constraints of having people in front of you, so you talk about abstract matters.
Someone who says "I am busy" is either declaring incompetence (and lack of control of his life) or trying to get rid of you.
The imagination of the genius vastly surpasses his intellect; the intellect of the academic vastly surpasses his imagination
The key to wealth is that it doesn't matter. Once you've had it, you don't think anything of it; you can wear cheap watches.
What is nonmeasurable and nonpredictable will remain nonmeasurable and nonpredictable ... no matter how much hate mail I get.
Failure saves lives. In the airline industry, every time a plane crashes the probability of the next crash is lowered by that.
When we want to do something while unconsciously certain to fail, we seek advice so we can blame someone else for the failure.
Private equity has absolutely no reason to exist. The private equity holder has all the upside and the banks all the downside.
The tragedy of virtue is that the more obvious, boring, unoriginal, and sermonizing the proverb, the harder it is to implement.
Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.
Success is about honour, feeling morally calibrated, absence of shame, not what some newspaper defines from an external metric.
Never ask anyone for their opinion, forecast, or recommendation. Just ask them what they have—or don’t have—in their portfolio.
The difference between slaves in Roman and Ottoman days and today's employees is that slaves did not need to flatter their boss.
It might be useful to be able to predict war. But tension does not necessarily lead to war, but often to peace and to denouement.
The curious mind embraces science; the gifted and sensitive, the arts; the practical, business; the leftover becomes an economist
Only in recent history has "working hard" signaled pride rather than shame for lack of talent, finesse and, mostly, sprezzatura .
Nobody reads the disclosures that roll down your computer screen. You click 'I agree' but you don't know what you're agreeing to.
Redundancy is ambiguous because it seems like a waste if nothing unusual happens. Except that something unusual happens-usually .
A system, artificially stabilized, and of course you have hidden risks under the surface, and you don't know where the risks are.
The rationalist imagines an imbecile-free society; the empiricist and imbecile-proof one, or even better, a rationalist-proof one.
To succeed in life requires a total inability to do anything that makes you uncomfortable when you look at yourself in the mirror.
The track record of economists in predicting events is monstrously bad. It is beyond simplification; it is like medieval medicine.
This is the tragedy of modernity: as with neurotically overprotective parents, those trying to help are often hurting us the most.
Answer e-mails from junior people before more senior ones. Junior people have further to go and tend to remember who slighted them.
What organized dating sites fail to understand is that the people are far more interesting in what they don't say about themselves.
The best test of whether someone is extremely stupid (or extremely wise) is whether financial and political news makes sense to him.
Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility.
Any system that is deprived of its natural volatility, with government up (unintelligible) volatile, any system becomes very fragile.
They will envy you for your success, your wealth, for your intelligence, for your looks, for your status - but rarely for your wisdom.
A Stoic is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into transformation, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking.
You will get the most attention from those who hate you. No friend, no admirer and no partner will flatter you with as much curiosity.
Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love; close enough on the surface but, to the non-sucker, not exactly the same thing.
When I trade, I don't have an agency problem; I have my neck on the line. When a bank or banker trades, it's not his neck on the line.
You want failures to be small and informational. Silicon Valley does very well. It knows how to use failure as a tool for improvement.
You want to be yourself, idiosyncratic; the collective (school, rules, jobs, technology) wants you generic to the point of castration.
It takes extraordinary wisdom and self-control to accept that many things have a logic we do not understand that is smarter than our own.
In the United States large corporations control some members of Congress. All this does is delay the corporation’s funeral at our expense.
But they never notice the following inconsistency: this so-called worst-case event, when it happened, exceeded the worst case at the time.
Modernity needs to understand that being rich and becoming rich are not mathematically, personally, socially, and ethically the same thing.
The traits I respect are erudition and the courage to stand up when half-men are afraid for their reputation. Any idiot can be intelligent.
In the United States, large corporations control some members of Congress. All this does is delay the corporation's funeral at our expense.
Avoid losers. If you hear someone use the words 'impossible', 'never', 'too difficult' too often, drop him or her from your social network.
By all means, avoid words—threats, complaints, justification, narratives, reframing, attempts to win arguments, supplications; avoid words!
Switzerland is the perfect place where you have volatility at a municipal level that nothing up top - small units competing with each other.
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.
Go to parties. You can't even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.
If something is going on, I hear about it. I like to talk to people, I socialise. Television is a waste of time. Human contact is what matters.
Never take advice from anyone in a tie. They'll bankrupt you. Don't ask a general for advice on war, and don't ask a broker for advice on money.
When you beat up someone physically, you get excercise and stress relief; when you assault him verbally on the Internet, you just harm yourself.
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.