Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Nobody reads the disclosures that roll down your computer screen. You click 'I agree' but you don't know what you're agreeing to.

Fragility is the quality of things that are vulnerable to volatility.

Those who were unlucky in life in spite of their skills would eventually rise. The lucky fool might have benefited from some luck in life; over the longer run he would slowly converge to the state of a less-lucky idiot. Each one would revert to his long-term properties.

Individuals should think about the worst-case scenarios and plan for them. The world will be crazier than you think it will be. Put money away, and then you can live with much more freedom.

A good maxim allows you to have the last word without even starting a conversation.

A Stoic is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into transformation, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking.

They think that intelligence is about noticing things are relevant (detecting patterns); in a complex world, intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant (avoiding false patterns)

The grandchildren should not bear the debts of the grandparents.

Wear your best for your execution and stand dignified. Your last recourse against randomness is how you act - if you can't control outcomes, you can control the elegance of your behaviour. You will always have the last word.

The psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has a simple heuristic. Never ask the doctor what you should do. Ask him what he would do if he were in your place. You would be surprised at the difference

We tend to use knowledge as therapy.

A prophet is not someone with special visions, just someone blind to most of what others see

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

The classical man's worst fear was inglorious death; the modern man's worst fear is just death

When you develop your opinions on the basis of weak evidence, you will have difficulty interpreting subsequent information that contradicts these opinions, even if this new information is obviously more accurate.

In economic life and history more generally, just about everything of consequence comes from black swans; ordinary events have paltry effects in the long term.

Probability is not a mere computation of odds on the dice or more complicated variants; it is the acceptance of the lack of certainty in our knowledge and the development of methods for dealing with our ignorance.

What organized dating sites fail to understand is that the people are far more interesting in what they don't say about themselves.

The curious mind embraces science; the gifted and sensitive, the arts; the practical, business; the leftover becomes an economist

If you have more than one reason to do something (choose a doctor or veterinarian, hire a gardener or an employee, marry a person, go on a trip), just don’t do it. It does not mean that one reason is better than two, just that by invoking more than one reason you are trying to convince yourself to do something. Obvious decisions (robust to error) require no more than a single reason.

...maximize the serendipity around you.