Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes

There are two kinds of weakness, that which breaks and that which bends.

I think hearts are very much like glasses. If they do not break with the first ring, they usually last a considerable time.

I like to play a strong woman, but a strong woman can also be very fragile and vulnerable at the same time.

Systems governed by only one set of rules are more vulnerable than those with variety.

Caught between glass and wood, that which breaks and that which bends, that which sings and that which survive. So our lives go.

If foundations made of stone can turn to dust, then the hardest hearts of steel can turn to rust.

The fragile wants tranquility, the antifragile grows from disorder, and the robust doesn't care too much.

[Urbanization] is the inevitable outcome of the processes of growth and the processes of modernization.

It is with happiness as with watches: the less complicated, the less easily deranged.

Population growth and the proliferation of mega-cities around the world redefines the entire global security agenda.

For though the camomile, the more it is trodden on the faster it grows, yet youth, the more it is wasted, the sooner it wears.

There’s something brittle in me that will break before it bends.

I got hit in the face with a gun. I'm not very fragile at all. It makes me think maybe things would be easier if I were terribly frail and fragile somehow.

The city that has speed has success.

Weakness is a great thing, and strength is nothing. When a man is just born, he is weak and flexible. When he dies, he is hard and insensitive. When a tree is growing, it's tender and pliant. But when it's dry and hard, it dies. Hardness and strength are death's companions. Pliancy and weakness are expressions of the freshness of being. Because what has hardened will never win.

But in my heart I knew that just like the new grass, I wasn't strong enough yet to be walked on

One of the things forgotten about the human spirit is that while it is, in the right conditions, noble and brave and wonderful, it is also, when you get right down to it, only human.

I wish my life could be like that, knotted up so that even if something broke, the whole thing wouldn't come apart.

Cities are never random. No matter how chaotic they might seem, everything about them grows out of a need to solve a problem. In fact, a city is nothing more than a solution to a problem, that in turn creates more problems that need more solutions, until towers rise, roads widen, bridges are built, and millions of people are caught up in a mad race to feed the problem-solving, problem-creating frenzy.

A tree that is unbending, is easily broken.

The sturdiest virtue seems fragile.

Hee that makes a thing too fine, breakes it.

Not everything in the world is easy or powerful.

But you have to understand, American democracy is not like the system you have. We're not an ocean liner that sails across the ocean from point A to point B at 30 knots. That's not American democracy. American democracy is kind of like a life raft that bobs around the ocean all the time. Your feet are always wet. Winds are always blowing. You're cold. You're wet. You're uncomfortable -- but you never sink.

Tower'd cities please us then, And the busy hum of men.