Banking is a very treacherous business because you don't realize it is risky until it is too late. It is like calm waters that deliver huge storms.

There are systems that use failure as fuel for improvement, where the cost of failure is small.

Poverty is clearly one source of emotional suffering, but there are others, like loneliness.

Heroes are heroes because they are heroic in behavior, not because they won or lost.

I suspect the I.Q., SAT, and school grades are tests designed by nerds so they can get high scores in order to call each other intelligent...Smart and wise people who score low on IQ tests, or patently intellectually defective ones, like the former U.S. president George W. Bush, who score high on them (130), are testing the test and not the reverse.

Umberto Eco is the owner of a large personal library of almost 30,000 books that he has not read. [To him] read books are far less valuable than unread ones.

Those who were unlucky in life in spite of their skills would eventually rise. The lucky fool might have benefited from some luck in life; over the longer run he would slowly converge to the state of a less-lucky idiot. Each one would revert to his long-term properties.