Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes

When in the end, the day came on which I was going away, I learned the strange learning that things can happen which we ourselves cannot possibly imagine, either beforehand, or at the time when they are taking place, or afterwards when we look back on them.

Entrepreneurs have only the murkiest picture of the future in which they are making their bets, and also there is ambiguity: they don't know when they push this lever or that lever that the outcome is going to be what they think it is going to be - there is the law of unanticipated consequences.

It is an endless procession of surprises. The expected rarely occurs and never in the expected manner.

A good investor in this new world knows to always expect the unexpected.

It's been predictable, in the sense of 'expect the unexpected'.

One cannot plan for the unexpected.

If there's one thing that's certain in business, it's uncertainty.

If your investing approach requires that you become Nostradamus to succeed, then you are destined to fail.

Markets are constantly in a state of uncertainty and flux and money is made by discounting the obvious and betting on the unexpected.

Business is all about risk taking and managing uncertainties and turbulence.

Accidents will happen in the best regulated families.

They've been fairly positive, as firm as they could be in regards to the derivatives operations in Montreal. We didn't sense that there was a hesitation about it. But things change.

Some things are so unexpected that no one is prepared for them.

Mistakes, after all, are endemic to foreign and military policy given the unpredictability of events and the difficulty of securing reliable information in a place like Iraq.

Investors don't like uncertainty.

Life is intrinsically, well, boring and dangerous at the same time. At any given moment the floor may open up. Of course, it almost never does; that's what makes it so boring.

No amount of thought can ever reveal what comes unexpectedly.

Uncertainty about sales impedes business planning and could harm capital formation just as much as uncertainty about inflation can create uncertainty about relative prices and harm business planning.

I don't know what the future holds. Anything is possible.

You know, people talk about this being an uncertain time. You know, all time is uncertain. I mean, it was uncertain back in - in 2007, we just didn't know it was uncertain. It was - uncertain on September 10th, 2001. It was uncertain on October 18th, 1987, you just didn't know it.

The substantial uncertainty about the path of asset price movements going forward necessarily reduces the case for altering policy in advance of the move.

In the investment business, you must expect to be wrong.

The future has a way of arriving unannounced.

The nature of the global business environment guarantees that no matter how hard we work to create a stable and healthy organisation, our organisation will continue to experience dramatic changes far beyond our control.

We can't continue to always base our strategy on the fact that the other guy is going to mess up all the time.