All Quotes

"Because our minds need to reduce information, we are more likely to try to squeeze a phenomenon into the Procrustean bed of a crisp and known category (amputating the unknown), rather than suspend categorization, and make it tangible. Thanks to our detections of false patterns, along with real ones, what is random will appear less random and more certain—our overactive brains are more likely to impose the wrong, simplistic, narrative than no narrative at all."

"There is a certain category of fool—the overeducated, the academic, the journalist, the newspaper reader, the mechanistic "scientist", the pseudo-empiricist, those endowed with what I call "epistemic arrogance", this wonderful ability to discount what they did not see, the unobserved."

"We are robust when errors in the representation of the unknown and understanding of random effects do not lead to adverse outcomes —fragile otherwise."

"I have respect for mother nature's methods of robustness (billions of years allow most of what is fragile to break); classical thought is more robust (in its respect for the unknown, the epistemic humility) than the modern post-Enlightenment naïve pseudoscientific autism. Thus my classical values make me advocate the triplet of erudition, elegance, and courage; against modernity’s phoniness, nerdiness and philistinism."

"To become a philosopher, start by walking very slowly."

"I want to live happily in a world I don't understand."

"We didn't get where we are thanks to the sissy notion of resilience."

"Simplicity is not so simple to attain."

"Modernity has replaced ethics with legalese."

"If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud."

"Just as being nice to the arrogant is no better than being arrogant toward the nice; being accommodating toward anyone committing a nefarious action condones it."

"Compromising is condoning. The only modern dictum I follow one by George Santayana: A man is morally free when... he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity. This is not just an aim but an obligation."

"The fragile wants tranquility, the antifragile grows from disorder, and the robust doesn't care too much."

"Half of life—the interesting half of life—we don't even have a name for."

"It is all about redundancy. Nature likes to overinsure itself."

"If humans fight the last war, nature fights the next one."

"Information is antifragile; it feeds more on attempts to harm it than it does on efforts to promote it."

"Much of aging comes from a misunderstanding of the effect of comfort."

"The best way to learn a language may be an episode of jail in a foreign country."

"If I could predict what my day would exactly look like, I would feel a little bit dead."

"Much of modern life is preventable chronic stress injury."

"People who are bred, selected, and compensated to find complicated solutions do not have an incentive to implement simplified ones."

"It is often the mistakes of others that benefit the rest of us—and, sadly, not them ... For the antifragile, harm from errors should be less than the benefits."

"He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once."

"The antifragility of the higher level may require the fragility—and sacrifice—of the lower one."

"It is painful to think about ruthlessness as an engine of improvement."

"There is no such thing as a failed soldier, dead or alive (unless he acted in a cowardly manner)—likewise there is no such thing as a failed entrepreneur or failed scientific researcher ..."

"This is the central illusion in life: that randomness is a risk, that it is a bad thing ..."

"Injecting some confusion stabilizes the system."

"When some systems are stuck in a dangerous impasse, randomness and only randomness can unlock them and set them free."

"Randomness works well in search—sometimes better than humans."

"Modernity widened the distance between the sensational and the relevant."

"[A] theory is a very dangerous thing to have."

"Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility."

"Daily news and sugar confuse our system in the same manner."

"What is nonmeasurable and nonpredictable will remain nonmeasurable and nonpredictable ... no matter how much hate mail I get."

"A man is honorable in proportion to the personal risks he takes for his opinion."

"My idea of the modern Stoic sage is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into information, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking."

"Our greatest asset is the one we distrust the most: the built-in antifragility of certain risk-taking systems."

"The worst side effect of wealth is the social associations it forces on its victims, as people with big houses end up socializing with other people with big houses."

"I suppose that the main benefit of being rich (over just being independent) is to be able to despise rich people (a good concentration of whom you find in glitzy ski resorts) without any sour grapes. It is even sweeter when these farts don't know that you are richer than they are."

"An option hides where we don't want it to hide."

"[I]n academia there is no difference between academia and the real world; in the real world, there is."

"[I]t is about distortions of symmetry and reciprocity in life: If you have the rewards, you must also get some of the risks, not let others pay the price for your mistakes. ...If you give an opinion and someone follows it, you are morally obligated to be, yourself, exposed to its consequences."

"In case you are giving economic views: Don't tell me what you "think," just tell me what's in your portfolio."

"[N]ever engage in detailed overexplanations of why something is important: one debases a principle by endlessly justifying it."

"You can be an intellectual yet still be an idiot. 'Educated philistines' have been wrong on everything from Stalinism to Iraq to low-carb diets."

"The knowledge we get by tinkering, via trial and error, experience, and the workings of time, in other words, contact with the earth, is vastly superior to that obtained through reasoning, something self-serving institutions have been very busy hiding from us."

"Bureaucracy is a construction by which a person is conveniently separated from the consequences of his or her actions."

"Avoid taking advice from someone who gives advice for a living, unless there is a penalty for their advice."