If you enjoy wise and pithy aphorisms, I highly recommend this book. Taleb can also be found on YouTube videos in various presentations and lectures about risk, fragility, randomness, probability and other subjects.. He is a very smart man on a variety of topics. It’s a mental and intellectual adventure to keep up and understand what he is saying at times.

Here is a very small taste of his wisdom and thinking from the book…

Maternity’s double punishment is to make us both age prematurely and live longer.

If you know, in the morning, what your day looks like with any precision, you are a little bit dead – – the more precision, the more dead you are.

It is not possible to have fun when you try.

Decline starts with the replacement of dreams with memories and ends with the replacement of memories with other memories.

The fastest way to become rich is to socialize with the poor; the fastest way to become poor is to socialize with the rich.

Modernity: we created youth without heroism, age, without wisdom, and life without grandeur.

Avoid calling heroes those who had no other choice.

The only valid political system is one that can handle an imbecile and power without suffering from it.

The Bed of Procrustes

Those who can’t do shouldn’t teach.

For Seneca, stoic Sage should withdraw from public efforts when unheeded and the state is corrupt beyond repair. It is wiser to wait for self-destruction.