"My major hobby is teasing people who take themselves and the quality of their knowledge too seriously and those who don’t have the guts to sometimes say: I don’t know...."

"Greatness starts with the replacement of hatred with polite disdain."

"Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness."

"Mental clarity is the child of courage, not the other way around."

"The sucker’s trap is when you focus on what you know and what others don’t know, rather than the reverse."

"You want to be yourself, idiosyncratic; the collective (school, rules, jobs, technology) wants you generic to the point of castration."

"The fool generalizes the particular; the nerd particularizes the general; ... the wise does neither."

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

"Hard science gives sensational results with a horribly boring process; philosophy gives boring results with a sensational process; literature gives sensational results with a sensational process; and economics gives boring results with a boring process."

"A competitive athlete is painful to look at; trying hard to become an animal rather than a man, he will never be as fast as a cheetah or as strong as an ox."

"Decomposition, for most, starts when they leave the free, social, and uncorrupted college life for the solitary confinement of professions and nuclear families."

"What they call “play” (gym, travel, sports) looks like work."

"Only in recent history has “working hard” signaled pride rather than shame for lack of talent, finesse and, mostly, sprezzatura."

"You have a real life if and only if you do not compete with anyone in any of your pursuits."

"The twentieth century was the bankruptcy of the social utopia; the twenty-first will be that of the technological one."

"They are born, put in a box; they go home to live in a box; they study by ticking boxes; they go to what is called “work” in a box, where they sit in their cubicle box; they drive to the grocery store in a box to buy food in a box; they talk about thinking “outside the box”; and when they die they are put in a box."

"Those who do not think that employment is systemic slavery are either blind or employed."

"Charm is the ability to insult people without offending them; nerdiness the reverse."

"Preoccupation with efficacy is the main obstacle to a poetic, elegant, robust and heroic life."

"You can tell how uninteresting a person is by asking him whom he finds interesting."

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

"You are rich if and only if money you refuse tastes better than money you accept."

"The difference between slaves in Roman and Ottoman days and today’s employees is that slaves did not need to flatter their boss."

"Someone who says “I am busy” is either declaring incompetence (and lack of control of his life) or trying to get rid of you."

"A man without a heroic bent starts dying at the age of thirty."

"Read nothing from the past one hundred years; eat no fruits from the past one thousand years; drink nothing from the past four thousand years (just wine and water); but talk to no ordinary man over forty."

"What fools call “wasting time” is most often the best investment."

"Older people are most beautiful when they have what is lacking in the young: poise, , wisdom, , and this post-heroic absence of agitation."

"Modernity needs to understand that being rich and becoming rich are not mathematically, personally, socially, and ethically the same thing."

"Success is becoming in middle adulthood what you dreamed to be in late childhood."

"To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week’s newspapers."

"Restaurants get you in with food to sell you liquor; religions get you in with belief to sell you rules."

"The book is the only medium left that hasn’t been corrupted by the profane."

"People used to wear ordinary clothes weekdays, and formal attire on Sunday. Today it is the exact reverse."

"You exist if and only if you are free to do things without a visible objective, with no justification and, above all, outside the dictatorship of someone else’s narrative."

"Asking science to explain life and vital matters is equivalent to asking a grammarian to explain poetry."

"It’s harder to say no when you really mean it."

"When we want to do something while unconsciously certain to fail, we seek advice so we can blame someone else for the failure."

"Procrastination is the soul rebelling against entrapment."

"Using, as an excuse, others’ failure of common sense is in itself a failure of common sense."

"In science you need to understand the world; in business you need others to misunderstand it."

"Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love."

"An idea starts to be interesting when you get scared of taking it to its logical conclusion."

"Economic life should be definancialised. We should learn not to use markets as storehouses of value: they do not harbour the certainties that normal citizens require. Citizens should experience anxiety about their own businesses (which they control), not their investments (which they do not control)."

"Using leverage to cure the problems of too much leverage is not homeopathy, it is denial. The debt crisis is not a temporary problem, it is a structural one. We need rehab."

"Only Ponzi schemes should depend on confidence. Governments should never need to “restore confidence.” Cascading rumours are a product of complex systems. Governments cannot stop the rumours. Simply, we need to be in a position to shrug off rumours, be robust in the face of them."

"It is the asymmetry of the bonus system that got us here. No incentives without disincentives: capitalism is about rewards and punishments, not just rewards."

"The economics establishment (universities, regulators, central bankers, government officials, various organisations staffed with economists) lost its legitimacy with the failure of the system. It is irresponsible and foolish to put our trust in the ability of such experts to get us out of this mess. Instead, find the smart people whose hands are clean."

"Globalization creates interlocking fragility, while reducing volatility and giving the appearance of stability. In other words it creates devastating Black Swans. We have never lived before under the threat of a global collapse. Financial Institutions have been merging into a smaller number of very large banks. Almost all banks are interrelated. So the financial ecology is swelling into gigantic, incestuous, bureaucratic banks — when one fails, they all fall. The increased concentration among banks seems to have the effect of making financial crisis less likely, but when they happen they are more global in scale and hit us very hard. We have moved from a diversified ecology of small banks, with varied lending policies, to a more homogeneous framework of firms that all resemble one another. True, we now have fewer failures, but when they occur... I shiver at the thought."

"This makes living in big cities invaluable because you increase the odds of serendipitous encounters — you gain exposure to the envelope of serendipity."