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.

He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once.

I don't know anyone on Wall Street who goes to work every day thinking of anything but how to increase their bonus.

When you ask people, 'What's the opposite of fragile?,' they tend to say robust, resilient, adaptable, solid, strong. That's not it. The opposite of fragile is something that gains from disorder.

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

Never ask anyone for their opinion, forecast, or recommendation. Just ask them what they have—or don’t have—in their portfolio.

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