The payoff of a human venture is, in general, inversely proportional to what it is expected to be.
Modernity widened the distance between the sensational and the relevant.
Mental clarity is the child of courage, not the other way around.
The best way to learn a language may be an episode of jail in a foreign country.
You have a real life if and only if you do not compete with anyone in any of your pursuits.
A man without a heroic bent starts dying at the age of thirty.
Asking science to explain life and vital matters is equivalent to asking a grammarian to explain poetry.
Randomness works well in search sometimes better than humans.
I disagree with the followers of Marx and those of Adam Smith: the reason free markets work is because they allow people to be lucky, thanks to aggressive trial and error, not by giving rewards or “incentives” for skill.
Cumulative errors depend largely on the big surprises, the big opportunities. Not only do economic, financial, and political predictors miss them, but they are quite ashamed to say anything outlandish to their clients and yet events, it turns out, are almost always outlandish.
Don’t cross a river if it is four feet deep on average.
It’s harder to say no when you really mean it.
Modernity needs to understand that being rich and becoming rich are not mathematically, personally, socially, and ethically the same thing.
Older people are most beautiful when they have what is lacking in the young: poise, erudition, wisdom, phronesis, and this post-heroic absence of agitation.
The sucker’s trap is when you focus on what you know and what others don’t know, rather than the reverse.
It takes extraordinary wisdom and self-control to accept that many things have a logic we do not understand that is smarter than our own.
For the classics philosophical insight was the product of a life of leisure; for me a life of leisure is the product of philosophical insight.
We didn’t get where we are thanks to the sissy notion of resilience.
Intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant.
Information is antifragile; it feeds more on attempts to harm it than it does on efforts to promote it.