Being an economist is the least ethical profession, closer to charlatanism than any science.
Economics make homeopath and alternative healers look empirical and scientific.
Fragility is the quality of things that are vulnerable to volatility.
The fastest way to become rich is to socialize with the poor; the fastest way to become poor is to socialize with the rich.
It is a sign of weakness to avoid showing signs of weakness.
We favor the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated, and the tangible; we scorn the abstract.
Realism is punishing. Probabilistic skepticism is worse.
I hated school because I liked to daydream and the system tried to stop me from that.
Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love.
You never win an argument until they attack your person.
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.
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.
This is the central illusion in life: that randomness is a risk, that it is a bad thing...
By setting oneself totally free of constraints, free of thoughts, free of this debilitating activity called work, free of efforts, elements hidden in the texture of reality start staring at you; then mysteries that you never thought existed emerge in front of your eyes.
Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love; close enough on the surface but, to the non-sucker, not exactly the same thing.
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.
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.
Life is a tightrope between two errors: generalizing the wrong particular and particularizing the wrong general.
If you roll dice, you know that the odds are one in six that the dice will come up on a particular side. So you can calculate the risk. But, in the stock market, such computations are bull – you don’t even know how many sides the dice have!
History doesn’t crawl; it leaps.