Rasmus > Rasmus's Quotes

“People who are envious cannot help feeling some glee when they hear of the bad luck of those they envy.”
― Robert Greene, The Daily Laws: 366 Meditations on Power, Seduction, Mastery, Strategy, and Human Nature

“The root of the Latin word for envy, invidia, means “to look through, to probe with the eyes like a dagger.”
― Robert Greene, The Daily Laws: 366 Meditations on Power, Seduction, Mastery, Strategy, and Human Nature

“The envy elicited by Sir Walter Raleigh is the worst kind: It was inspired by his natural talent and grace, which he felt was best displayed in its full flower.”
― Robert Greene, The 48 Laws of Power

“Some can be more intelligent than others in a structured environment—in fact school has a selection bias as it favors those quicker in such an environment, and like anything competitive, at the expense of performance outside it. Although I was not yet familiar with gyms, my idea of knowledge was as follows. People who build their strength using these modern expensive gym machines can lift extremely large weights, show great numbers and develop impressive-looking muscles, but fail to lift a stone; they get completely hammered in a street fight by someone trained in more disorderly settings. Their strength is extremely domain-specific and their domain doesn't exist outside of ludic—extremely organized—constructs. In fact their strength, as with over-specialized athletes, is the result of a deformity. I thought it was the same with people who were selected for trying to get high grades in a small number of subjects rather than follow their curiosity: try taking them slightly away from what they studied and watch their decomposition, loss of confidence, and denial. (Just like corporate executives are selected for their ability to put up with the boredom of meetings, many of these people were selected for their ability to concentrate on boring material.) I've debated many economists who claim to specialize in risk and probability: when one takes them slightly outside their narrow focus, but within the discipline of probability, they fall apart, with the disconsolate face of a gym rat in front of a gangster hit man.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

“I want to live happily in a world I don’t understand.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“This is the tragedy of modernity: as with neurotically overprotective parents, those trying to help are often hurting us the most.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“Most humans manage to squander their free time, as free time makes them dysfunctional, lazy, and unmotivated—the busier they get, the more active they are at other tasks.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“Success brings an asymmetry: you now have a lot more to lose than to gain. You are hence fragile.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“never trust the words of a man who is not free.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“much of what other people know isn’t worth knowing.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“More data means more information, but it also means more false information.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

“A Stoic is a Buddhist with attitude, one who says “f*** you” to fate.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“Since procrastination is a message from our natural willpower via low motivation, the cure is changing the environment, or one’s profession, by selecting one in which one does not have to fight one’s impulses. Few can grasp the logical consequence that, instead, one should lead a life in which procrastination is good, as a naturalistic-risk-based form of decision making.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“Wind extinguishes a candle and energizes fire. Likewise with randomness, uncertainty, chaos: you want to use them, not hide from them. You want to be the fire and wish for the wind.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder

“it is only when you don’t care about your reputation that you tend to have a good one.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“I feel anger and frustration when I think that one in ten Americans beyond the age of high school is on some kind of antidepressant, such as Prozac. Indeed, when you go through mood swings, you now have to justify why you are not on some medication. There may be a few good reasons to be on medication, in severely pathological cases, but my mood, my sadness, my bouts of anxiety, are a second source of intelligence--perhaps even the first source. I get mellow and lose physical energy when it rains, become more meditative, and tend to write more and more slowly then, with the raindrops hitting the window, what Verlaine called autumnal "sobs" (sanglots). Some days I enter poetic melancholic states, what the Portuguese call saudade or the Turks huzun (from the Arabic word for sadness). Other days I am more aggressive, have more energy--and will write less, walk more, do other things, argue with researchers, answer emails, draw graphs on blackboards. Should I be turned into a vegetable or a happy imbecile?”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

“the best horses lose when they compete with slower ones, and win against better rivals.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“Note another element of Switzerland: it is perhaps the most successful country in history, yet it has traditionally had a very low level of university education compared to the rest of the rich nations. Its system, even in banking during my days, was based on apprenticeship models, nearly vocational rather than the theoretical ones. In other words, on techne (crafts and know how), not episteme (book knowledge, know what).”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder

“he tends to mistake the unknown for the nonexistent.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“Seneca and stoicism as a back door to explain why everything antifragile has to have more upside than downside”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“A man is honorable in proportion to the personal risks he takes for his opinion.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

“Never listen to a leftist who does not give away his fortune or does not live the exact lifestyle he wants others to follow. What the French call “the caviar left,” la gauche caviar, or what Anglo-Saxons call champagne socialists, are people who advocate socialism, sometimes even communism, or some political system with sumptuary limitations, while overtly leading a lavish lifestyle, often financed by inheritance—not realizing the contradiction that they want others to avoid just such a lifestyle. It is not too different from the womanizing popes, such as John XII, or the Borgias. The contradiction can exceed the ludicrous as with French president François Mitterrand of France who, coming in on a socialist platform, emulated the pomp of French monarchs. Even more ironic, his traditional archenemy, the conservative General de Gaulle, led a life of old-style austerity and had his wife sew his socks.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder

“We ingest probiotics because we don’t eat enough “dirt” anymore.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder

“Authors, artists, and even philosophers are much better off having a very small number of fanatics behind them than a large number of people who appreciate their work. The number of persons who dislike the work don’t count—there is no such thing as the opposite of buying your book,”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“Had Prozac been available last century, Baudelaire's "spleen," Edgar Allan Poe's moods, the poetry of Sylvia Plath, the lamentations of so many other poets, everything with a soul would have been silenced*....
If large pharmaceutical companies were able to eliminate the seasons, they would probably do so--for profit, of course.

*This does not mean that Sylvia Plath should not have been medicated at all. The point is that pathologies should be medicated when there is risk of suicide, not mood swings.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

“those who do too much somewhere do too little elsewhere”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“My dream—the solution—is that we would have a National Entrepreneur Day, with the following message: Most of you will fail, disrespected, impoverished, but we are grateful for the risks you are taking and the sacrifices you are making for the sake of the economic growth of the planet and pulling others out of poverty. You are at the source of our antifragility. Our nation thanks you.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“This is the central illusion in life: that randomness is risky, that it is a bad thing—and that eliminating randomness is done by eliminating randomness.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“Wind extinguishes a candle and energizes fire.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“You can imagine how distraught I feel when I hear about the glorified heroism-free “middle class values,” which, thanks to globalization and the Internet, have spread to any place easily reached by British Air, enshrining the usual opiates of the deified classes: “hard work” for a bank or a tobacco company, diligent newspaper reading, obedience to most, but not all, traffic laws, captivity in some corporate structure, dependence on the opinion of a boss (with one’s job records filed in the personnel department), good legal compliance, reliance on stock market investments, tropical vacations, and a suburban life (under some mortgage) with a nice-looking dog and Saturday night wine tasting.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder