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
I'm a private intellectual, not a public one.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The speaker prefers to engage in intellectual pursuits privately rather than in the public spotlight.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb distinguishes between being a private intellectual and a public one, suggesting that true intellectual engagement often occurs away from public scrutiny. He implies that the value of ideas can be diminished when exposed to the pressures of public opinion, advocating for a more personal and unencumbered exploration of thought and knowledge.
Themes
IntellectualPrivatePublicThoughtIdeas
In practice
Example use cases
In a university lecture on the importance of private study as opposed to public debate.
More from Nassim Nicholas Taleb
All quotes βFragility is the quality of things that are vulnerable to volatility.
Nassim Nicholas TalebRead
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.
Nassim Nicholas TalebRead
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.
Nassim Nicholas TalebRead
A good maxim allows you to have the last word without even starting a conversation.
Nassim Nicholas TalebRead
A Stoic is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into transformation, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking.
Nassim Nicholas TalebRead
Similar quotes
I have no argument with those who see in organized religion a template or an imperative to live life according to a prescribed set of beliefs. Just give others the room, within the laws of civil society, to believe or not believe whatever they like.
Michael J. FoxRead
Seen through the eyes of faith, religion's future is secure. As long as there are human beings, there will be religion for the sufficient reason that the self is a theomorphic creature - one whose morphe (form) is theos - God encased within it. Having been created in the imago Dei, the image God, all human beings have a God-shaped vacuum built into their hearts. Since nature abhors a vacuum, people keep trying to fill the one inside them.
Huston SmithRead
With ruin upon ruin, rout on rout, Confusion worse confounded.
John MiltonRead
Originality is being different from oneself, not others.
Philip LarkinRead
The river is everywhere at the same time . . . everywhere and the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past, nor the shadow of the future.
Hermann HesseRead
Both our senses and our passions are a supply to the imperfection of our nature; thus they show that we are such sort of creatures as to stand in need of those helps which higher orders of creatures do not.
Joseph ButlerRead