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
To become a philosopher, start by walking very slowly.
Interpretation
Philosophy requires deep contemplation and careful thought, which can be achieved through a slow and deliberate approach.
This quote by Nassim Nicholas Taleb highlights the importance of taking one's time to reflect and understand philosophical concepts. By suggesting that one should 'walk very slowly,' Taleb implies that genuine wisdom and insight come from a methodical, introspective journey rather than a hurried pursuit. The act of slowing down allows for greater awareness and a deeper engagement with complex ideas.
In practice
During a lecture on the importance of mindfulness, one might quote Taleb to emphasize a slower approach to understanding complex ideas.
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.
From Paul to Stalin, the popes who have chosen Caesar have prepared the way for Caesars who quickly learn to despise popes.
To us, it is incomprehensible that millions of Christian men killed and tortured each other because Napoleon was ambitious or Alexander was firm, or because England's policy was astute or the Duke of Oldenburg was wronged. We cannot grasp what connection such circumstances have the with the actual fact of slaughter and violence: why because the Duke was wronged, thousands of men from the other side of Europe killed and ruined the people of Smolensk and Moscow and were killed by them.
My own veneration for other faiths is the same as that for my own faith; therefore no thought of conversion is possible
Oftentimes I deliberately put ambiguity into my books so that... the reader is left with an echo of: 'How much of this was from me?'
The Universe is difficult to comprehend because it is obvious.
If facts, logic, and scientific procedures are all just arbitrarily "socially constructed" notions, then all that is left is consensus--more specifically peer consensus, the kind of consensus that matters to adolescents or to many among the intelligentsia.
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