Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes

You don't know what it's like to be me.

Remember, we see the world not as it is but as we are. Most of us see through the eyes of our fears and our limiting beliefs and our false assumptions.

When people don't understand what they're watching, a lot of what they perceive has to do with who they themselves are.

When birds look into houses, what impossible worlds they see.

We cannot ultimately specify the grounds (either metaphysical or logical or empirical) upon which we hold that our knowledge is true. Being committed to such grounds, dwelling in them, we are projecting ourselves to what we believe to be true from or through these grounds. We cannot therefore see what they are. We cannot look at them because we are looking with them.

There are no hierarchies, no infinite, no such many as mass, there are only/ eyes in all heads,/ to be looked out of.

Fleas know not whether they are upon the body of a giant or upon one of ordinary size.

Whatever you describe to another person is also a revelation of who you are and who you think you are. You can not describe anything without betraying your point of view, your aspirations, your fears, your hopes. Everything.

But we shall not know the world by looking at it; we know it by looking at the hovering fly.

To achieve accurate knowledge of others, if such a thing were possible, we could only ever arrive at it through the slow and unsure recognition of our own initial optical inaccuracies. However, such knowledge is not possible: for, while our vision of others is being adjusted, they, who are not made of mere brute matter, are also changing; we think we have managed to see them more clearly, but they shift; and when we believe we have them fully in focus, it is merely our older images of them that we have clarified, but which are themselves already out of date.

We can never be quite clear whether we are referring to the world as it is or to the world as we see it.

The self is merely the lens through which we see others and the world.

We see only that which we are.

If you hold a beautiful flower in your hand, you can write a whole book about it. However, you are still just you perceiving and experiencing it from your own point of view.

The circumstances of others seem good to us, while ours seem good to others.

But we do need a breather. We do need knowledge. And perhaps in a thousand years we might pick smaller cliffs to jump off. The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are. They’re Caesar’s praetorian guard, whispering as the parade roars down the avenue, ‘Remember, Caesar, thou art mortal.’ Most of us can’t rush around, talk to everyone, know all the cities of the world, we haven’t time, money or that many friends. The things you’re looking for, Montag, are in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine per cent of them is in a book.

each of us only feels the torn lining of his own coat and sees the wholeness of the other person's.

Nothing is as it seems; everything is as you allow it to be

Everything can be seen directly except the eye through which we see.

My experience is what I agree to attend to.

You're wrong means that I don't understand you, I'm not seeing what you're seeing- and I'm not seeing all of you there is to see. But there is nothing wrong with you. You are what you need to be, doing what you need to be doing, and although I may take steps to protect myself of others, I do not know all and therefore am literally inadequate to judge.

Our idea of a real problem is someone else's idea of an ultimate dream. Put the 'problem' in perspective

The world you see is less of an indication about the world and more of an indication about your seeing.

Accidents are just from where you're looking; to the ego, it looks like it's miracles and accidents.

Things which we see are not by themselves what we see ... It remains completely unknown to us what the objects may be by themselves and apart from the receptivity of our senses. We know nothing but our manner of perceiving them.