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Verum Insight
- Marcus Nikos
- Jan 26
- 3 min read
A Stoic is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into transformation, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking.”
“Heroes are heroes because they are heroic in behavior, not because they won or lost.”
“The difference between technology and slavery is that slaves are fully aware that they are not free”
“Difficulty is what wakes up the genius”
“They think that intelligence is about noticing things are relevant (detecting patterns); in a complex world, intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant (avoiding false patterns)”
“The best way to measure the loss of intellectual sophistication - this "nerdification," to put it bluntly - is in the growing disappearance of sarcasm, as mechanic minds take insults a bit too literally.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and
“A prophet is not someone with special visions, just someone blind to most of what others see”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and P
“The problem with experts is that they do not know what they do not know”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
“Suckers try to win arguments, nonsuckers try to win.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder
“The curse of modernity is that we are increasingly populated by a class of people who are better at explaining than understanding, or better at explaining than doing.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life
“Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love; close enough on the surface but, to the nonsucker, not exactly the same thing”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
“The curious mind embraces science; the gifted and sensitive, the arts; the practical, business; the leftover becomes an economist”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
“Only the autodidacts are free.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
“The irony of the process of thought control: the more energy you put into trying to control your ideas and what you think about, the more your ideas end up controlling you.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
“Further, my characterization of a loser is someone who, after making a mistake, doesn’t introspect, doesn’t exploit it, feels embarrassed and defensive rather than enriched with a new piece of information, and tries to explain why he made the mistake rather than moving on. These types often consider themselves the “victims” of some large plot, a bad boss, or bad weather. Finally, a thought. He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once. And someone who has made plenty of errors—though never the same error more than once—is more reliable than someone who has never made any.”
“Reality is far more vicious than Russian roulette. First, it delivers the fatal bullet rather infrequently, like a revolver that would have hundreds, even thousands of chambers instead of six. After a few dozen tries, one forgets about the existence of a bullet, under a numbing false sense of security. Second, unlike a well-defined precise game like Russian roulette, where the risks are visible to anyone capable of multiplying and dividing by six, one does not observe the barrel of reality. One is capable of unwittingly playing Russian roulette - and calling it by some alternative “low risk” game.”
“Courage is the only virtue you cannot fake.”
“For studying courage in textbooks doesn’t make you any more courageous than eating cow meat makes you bovine. By some mysterious mental mechanism, people fail to realize that the principal thing you can learn from a professor is how to be a professor—and the chief thing you can learn from, say, a life coach or inspirational speaker is how to become a life coach or inspirational speaker. So remember that the heroes of history were not classicists and library rats, those people who live vicariously in their texts. They were people of deeds and had to be endowed with the spirit of risk taking”
“How much you truly “believe” in something can be manifested only through what you are willing to risk for it.”
