Quotes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

A C.E.O.'s incentive is not to learn, because he's not paid on real value. He's paid on cosmetic value. So he's paid to be nice to the Merrill Lynch analysts or the Wall Street analysts. So this is where the problem starts.

Scientists don’t know what they are talking about when they talk about religion. Religion has nothing to do with belief, and I don’t believe it has any negative impact on people’s lives outside of intolerance. Why do I go to church? It’s like asking, why did you marry that woman? You make up reasons, but it’s probably just smell. I love the smell of candles. It’s an aesthetic thing.

We tend to treat our knowledge as personal property to be protected and defended.  It is an ornament that allows us to rise in the pecking order…we take what we know a little too seriously.

Read books are far less valuable than unread ones.

Answer e-mails from junior people before more senior ones. Junior people have further to go and tend to remember who slighted them.

Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW. You need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel or a private jet.

Don’t read newspapers for the news (just for the gossip and, of course, profiles of authors). The best filter to know if the news matters is if you hear it in cafes, restaurants... or (again) parties.

Avoid losers. If you hear someone use the words ‘impossible’, ‘never’, ‘too difficult’ too often, drop him or her from your social network. Never take ‘no’ for an answer (conversely, take most ‘yeses’ as ‘most probably’)

Learn to fail with pride — and do so fast and cleanly. Maximise trial and error — by mastering the error part.

Don’t disturb complicated systems that have been around for a very long time. We don’t understand their logic. Don’t pollute the planet. Leave it the way we found it, regardless of scientific ‘evidence’.