Anything that provides you with very, very stable income, very stable conditions, maybe generally stable, that often, it masks real risks, risks of blow-ups.

Never, never, never think - that's one lesson you should have in life. Never think that lack of variability is stability.

Prediction, not narration, is the real test of our understanding of the world.

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.

Life is a tightrope between two errors: generalizing the wrong particular and particularizing the wrong general.

The central idea in The Black Swan is that: rare events cannot be estimated from empirical observation since they are rare.

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