True humility is when you can surprise yourself more than others; the rest is either shyness or good marketing.

Governments that try to shoot for a surplus hardly ever reach it.

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

Weak men act to satisfy their needs, stronger men their duties.

If you reject unfounded blame, you must also reject unjustified praise.

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

Don't aim to be perfect. Aim to be antifragile.

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).

Bankers, they're not harmed by their mistakes. They benefit when things go right, and the society pays the price.

Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.

We tend to use knowledge as therapy.

In the past, only some of the males, but all of the females, were able to procreate. Equality is more natural for females.

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

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.

It is also naïve empiricism to provide, in support of some argument, series of eloquent confirmatory quotes by dead authorities. By searching, you can always find someone who made a well-sounding statement that confirms your point of view and, on every topic, it is possible to find another dead thinker who said the exact opposite.

The mental probabilistic map in one's mind is so geared toward sensational that one would realize informational gains by dispensing with the news.

Probability and expectation are not the same. Its probability and probability times the pay off.

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

Just as no monkey is as good-looking as the ugliest of humans, no academic is worthier than the worst of the creators.

It is much harder to become independent if you are wealthy than to become wealthy if you are independent.