People focus on role models; it is more effective to find antimodels - people you don't want to resemble when you grow up

Financial institutions have been merging into a smaller number of very large banks. Almost all banks are interrelated. So the financial ecology is swelling into gigantic, incestuous, bureaucratic banks-when one fails, they all fall. We have moved from a diversified ecology of small banks, with varied lending policies, to a more homogeneous framework of firms that all resemble one another. True, we now have fewer failures, but when they occur... I shiver at the thought.

Character is proportionate to N, the number of consecutive failures without being discouraged, or equivalently, the number of successive rejections without being intimidated.

Let me be more aggressive: we are largely better at doing than we are at thinking, thanks to antifragility. I’d rather be dumb and antifragile than extremely smart and fragile, any time.

It is much harder to become independent if you are wealthy than to become wealthy if you are independent.

Charm is the ability to insult people without offending them; nerdiness the reverse

If you don't feel that you haven't read enough, you haven't read enough.