Vos livres préférés (finance, développement personnel…) ?

Je termine à peine le très rigolo The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms de Nassim Taleb, un intuitif recueil d’aphorismes originaux, cinglants et percutants.



Mes préférés: (1) "Demander à la science d’expliquer la vie est comme demander à un Bescherelle d’expliquer la poésie"; (2) "L’ignorance consciente, si vous la pratiquez, vous ouvre un nouveau monde, car elle rend toute chose infinie".

Ci-dessous, mon petit best-of (je garde la version originale, et prie ceux qui ne lisent pas l’anglais de bien vouloir me pardonner):

Nassim Taleb a écrit :

Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love.

Nassim Taleb a écrit :

In science you need to understand the world. In business you need others to misunderstand it.

Nassim Taleb a écrit :

Education makes the wise slightly wiser, and the fool vastly more dangerous.

Nassim Taleb a écrit :

An erudite displays less than he knows; a journalist or a consultant, the opposite.

Nassim Taleb a écrit :

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.

Nassim Taleb a écrit :

Nobody wants to be perfectly transparent. Not to others, and certainly not to himself!

Nassim Taleb a écrit :

They will envy you for your success, for your wealth, for your looks, for your status - but never for your wisdom.

Nassim Taleb a écrit :

Nothing is more permanent than "temporary" arrangements, deficits, truces, and relationships; and nothing is more temporary than "permanent" ones.

Nassim Taleb a écrit :

The opposite of manliness isn’t cowardice, but technology.

Nassim Taleb a écrit :

A good listener is someone with skilfully polished indifference.

Nassim Taleb a écrit :

People reserve compliments for those who do not threaten their pride; the others they often praise by calling "arrogant".

Nassim Taleb a écrit :

A friendship that ends was never one.

Nassim Taleb a écrit :

We call narcissistic those individuals who behave as if they were the central residents of the world. Those who do exactly the same in a set of two we call lovers or, better, "blessed by love".

Nassim Taleb a écrit :

Most people fear being without audiovisual stimulation because they are too repetitive when they think and imagine things on their own.

Nassim Taleb a écrit :

Asking science to explain life is equivalent to asking a grammarian to explain poetry.

Nassim Taleb a écrit :

You exist if and only if you are free to do things without a visible objective, with no justification and, above all, outside the dictatorship or someone else’s narrative.

Nassim Taleb a écrit :

To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week’s newspapers.

Nassim Taleb a écrit :

You don’t become free by just avoiding to be a slave. You also need to avoid becoming a master.

Nassim Taleb a écrit :

What fools call "wasting time" is often the best investment.

Nassim Taleb a écrit :

Decline starts with the replacement of dreams with memories.

Nassim Taleb a écrit :

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

Nassim Taleb a écrit :

You can tell how uninteresting a person is by asking him whom he finds interesting.

Nassim Taleb a écrit :

People focus on role models. It is more effective to find antimodels - people you don’t want to resemble when you grow up.

Nassim Taleb a écrit :

It is as difficult to change someone’s opinions as it is to change his tastes.

Nassim Taleb a écrit :

The twentieth century was the bankruptcy of the social utopia. The twenty-first will be that of the technological one.

Nassim Taleb a écrit :

For so many, instead of looking for "cause of death" when they expire, we should rather be looking for "cause of life" when they’re still around.

Nassim Taleb a écrit :

The three most harmful addictions: heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.

Nassim Taleb a écrit :

Men destroy each other during was. Then they destroy themselves during peacetimes.

Nassim Taleb a écrit :

We are hunters. We are only truly alive in those moments when we improvise. No schedule, just small surprises and stimuli from the environment.

Nassim Taleb a écrit :

Charm lies in the unsaid, the unwritten, and the undisplayed. Every fool can control noise, but it takes great mastery to control silence.

Nassim Taleb a écrit :

It is much less dangerous to think like a man of action than to act like a man of thought.

Nassim Taleb a écrit :

The sucker’s trap is when you focus on what you know and others don’t know, rather than the reverse.

Nassim Taleb a écrit :

The calamity of the information age is that the toxicity of data increases much faster than its benefits.

Nassim Taleb a écrit :

Fine men tolerate others’ small inconsistencies though not the large ones. Weak men tolerate others’ large inconsistencies though not small ones.

Nassim Taleb a écrit :

Art is one-sided conversation with the unobserved.

Nassim Taleb a écrit :

Weak men act to satisfy their needs, strong men their duties.

Nassim Taleb a écrit :

In a crowd of a hundred, 50% of the wealth, 90% of the imagination, and 100% of the intellectual courage will reside in a single person - not necessarily the same one.

Nassim Taleb a écrit :

When conflicted with two choices, take neither.

Nassim Taleb a écrit :

Robust is when you care more about the few who like your work than the multitude who dislike it (artists). Fragile is when you care more about the few who dislike your work than the multitude who like it (politicians).

Nassim Taleb a écrit :

The imagination of the genius vastly surpasses his intellect; the intellect of the academic vastly surpasses his imagination.

Nassim Taleb a écrit :

Conscious ignorance, if you can practice it, expands your world - it takes things infinite.

Nassim Taleb a écrit :

Do not call heroes those who had no other choices.

Nassim Taleb a écrit :

Pure generosity is when you help the ingrate.

Nassim Taleb a écrit :

Saying the "mathematics" of uncertainty" is like saying the "chastity of sex".

Nassim Taleb a écrit :

A mathematician starts with a problem and finds a solution. A consultant starts with a solution and creates a problem.

Nassim Taleb a écrit :

Mediocre man tend to be outraged by small insults but passive, subdued, and silent in front of very large ones.

Nassim Taleb a écrit :

A verbal threat is the most authentic certificate of impotence.

Nassim Taleb a écrit :

Half the people lie with their lips; the other half with their tears.

Nassim Taleb a écrit :

They are men who surround themselves with women for ostentation. Others do it for consumption. They are rarely the same.

En bref, un parfait petit manuel pour briller dans les diners en ville!