Nobody reads the disclosures that roll down your computer screen. You click 'I agree' but you don't know what you're agreeing to.
Nassim Nicholas TalebRead
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.
Interpretation
Unpredictable and rare events have significant impacts, while everyday occurrences have little long-term effect.
This quote by Nassim Nicholas Taleb emphasizes the importance of rare and unpredictable events, termed 'black swans', in shaping economic outcomes and historical developments. Taleb argues that while common events may seem significant in the moment, it is the extraordinary occurrences that often lead to substantial consequences, altering the course of events in profound ways.
In practice
In a financial conference to highlight the impact of unexpected market crashes.
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.
I sense the world might be more dreamlike, metaphorical, and poetic than we currently believe--but just as irrational as sympathetic magic when looked at in a typically scientific way. I wouldn't be surprised if poetry--poetry in the broadest sense, in the sense of a world filled with metaphor, rhyme, and recurring patterns, shapes, and designs--is how the world works. The world isn't logical, it's a song.
The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it I have sacrificed everything, even death.
When everyone is moving towards depravity, no one seems to be moving, but if someone stops he shows up the others who are rushing on, by acting as a fixed point.
All sins are attempts to fill voids.
A condition of complete simplicity (Costing not less than everything)
In the dark colony of night, when I consider man's magnificent capacity for malice, madness, folly, envy, rage, and destructiveness, and I wonder whether we shall not end up as breakfast for newts and polyps, I seem to hear the muffled cries of all the words in all the books with covers closed.
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