The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (Incerto Book 4)

by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

At any stage, humans can thirst for money, knowledge, or love; sometimes for two, never for three.

Injuries done to us by others tend to be acute; the self-inflicted ones tend to be chronic.

When people call you intelligent it is almost always because they agree with you. Otherwise they just call you arrogant.

A good foe is far more loyal, far more predictable, and, to the clever, far more useful than the most valuable admirer.

(how we would like things to be so they make sense to us)

empiricism (how things are),

Nietzsche’s Zarathustra,

Kahlil Gibran, author of The Prophet.

Almutanabbi.

This discounting of the unseen comes from the human “scorn of the abstract” (our minds are not good at handling the non-anecdotal and tend to be swayed by vivid imagery, making the media distort our view of the world).