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The person you are the most afraid to contradict is yourself.
An idea starts to be interesting when you get scared of taking it to its logical conclusion.
People are much less interested in what you are trying to show them than in what you are trying to hide.
Pharmaceutical companies are better at inventing diseases that match existing drugs, rather than inventing drugs to match existing diseases.
To understand the liberating effect of asceticism, consider that losing all your fortune is much less painful than losing only half of it.
To bankrupt a fool, give him information.
Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love; close enough on the surface but, to the nonsucker, not exactly the same thing. * 1
In science you need to understand the world; in business you need others to misunderstand it.
I suspect that they put Socrates to death because there is something terribly unattractive, alienating, and nonhuman in thinking with too much clarity.
Education makes the wise slightly wiser, but it makes the fool vastly more dangerous.
The test of originality for an idea is not the absence of one single predecessor but the presence of multiple but incompatible ones.
Modernity’s double punishment is to make us both age prematurely and live longer.
An erudite is someone who displays less than he knows; a journalist or consultant, the opposite.
Your brain is most intelligent when you don’t instruct it on what to do—something people who take showers discover on occasion.
If your anger decreases with time, you did injustice; if it increases, you suffered injustice.
I wonder if those who advocate generosity for its rewards notice the inconsistency, or if what they call generosity is an attractive investment strategy. * 2
Those who think religion is about “belief” don’t understand religion, and don’t understand belief.
Work destroys your soul by stealthily invading your brain during the hours not officially spent working; be selective about professions.
In nature we never repeat the same motion; in captivity (office, gym, commute, sports), life is just repetitive-stress injury. No randomness.
Using, as an excuse, others’ failure of common sense is in itself a failure of common sense.
Compliance with the straitjacket of narrow (Aristotelian) logic and avoidance of fatal inconsistencies are not the same thing.
Economics cannot digest the idea that the collective (and the aggregate) are disproportionately less predictable than individuals.
Don’t talk about “progress” in terms of longevity, safety, or comfort before comparing zoo animals to those in the wilderness.
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.
There is no intermediate state between ice and water but there is one between life and death: employment.
You have a calibrated life when most of what you fear has the titillating prospect of adventure.
Procrastination is the soul rebelling against entrapment.
Nobody wants to be perfectly transparent; not to others, certainly not to himself.
Erudition without bullshit, intellect without cowardice, courage without imprudence, mathematics without nerdiness, scholarship without academia, intelligence without shrewdness, religiosity without intolerance, elegance without softness, sociality without dependence, enjoyment without addiction, religion without tolerance, and, above all, nothing without skin in the game.
* 1 I need a qualifier here. There are exceptions, but there are also many known cases in which a prostitute falls in love with a client.
* 2 A generous act is precisely what should aim at no reward, neither financial nor social nor emotional; deontic (unconditional observance of duties), not utilitarian (aiming at some collective—or even individual—gains in welfare). There is nothing wrong with “generous” acts that elicit a “warm glow” or promise salvation to the giver; these are not to be linguistically conflated with deontic actions, those emanating from pure sense of duty.