The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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Aphorisms require us to change our reading habits and approach them in small doses; each one of them is a complete unit, a complete narrative dissociated from others

Here go some of those aphorisms that I liked...

1. For company, you often prefer those who find you interesting over those you find interesting
2. The best revenge on a liar is to convince him that you believe what he said
3. You remember emails you sent that were not answered better than emails that you did not answer
4. To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week’s newspapers
5. You can tell how uninteresting a person is by asking him whom he finds interesting
6. It is a good practice to always apologize, except when you have done something wrong
7. Rumors are only valuable when they are denied
8. Over the long term, you are more likely to fool yourself than others
9. There are two types of people: those who try to win and those who try to win arguments. They are never the same
10. I suspect that they put Socrates to death because there is something terribly unattractive, alienating, and nonhuman in thinking with too much clarity
11. If your anger decreases with time, you did injustice; if it increases, you suffered injustice
12. Economics cannot digest the idea that the collective (and the aggregate) are disproportionately less predictable than individuals
13. When we want to do something while unconsciously certain to fail, we seek advice so we can blame someone else for the failure
14. Hatred is much harder to fake than love. You hear of fake love; never of fake hate
15. Wisdom in the young is as unattractive as frivolity in the elderly
16. It is a very recent disease to mistake the unobserved for the nonexistent; but some are plagued with the worse disease of mistaking the unobserved for the unobservable
17. You can replace lies with truth; but myth is only displaced with a narrative
18. Someone who says “I am busy” is either declaring incompetence (and lack of control of his life) or trying to get rid of you
19. For most, success is the harmful passage from the camp of the hating to the camp of the hated
20. Modernity: we created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur
21. People focus on role models; it is more effective to find antimodels—people you don’t want to resemble when you grow up
22. People usually apologize so they can do it again
23. The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary
24. Writing is the art of repeating oneself without anyone noticing
25. A good maxim allows you to have the last word without even starting a conversation
26. It is much less dangerous to think like a man of action than to act like a man of thought
27. We unwittingly amplify commonalities with friends, dissimilarities with strangers, and contrasts with enemies
28. Corollary to Moore’s Law: every ten years, collective wisdom degrades by half
29. What made medicine fool people for so long was that its successes were prominently displayed and its mistakes (literally) buried
30. The sucker’s trap is when you focus on what you know and what others don’t know, rather than the reverse
31. If you want to annoy a poet, explain his poetry
32. If you lie to me, keep lying; don’t hurt me by suddenly telling the truth
33. You may outlive your strength, never your wisdom
34. They think that intelligence is about noticing things that are relevant (detecting patterns); in a complex world, intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant (avoiding false patterns)
35. A mathematician starts with a problem and creates a solution; a consultant starts by offering a “solution” and creates a problem
36. You know you have influence when people start noticing your absence more than the presence of others
37. Some reticent people use silence to conceal their intelligence; but most do so to hide the lack of it
38. When someone starts a sentence with “simply,” you should expect to hear something very complicated

Every failure of what we call “wisdom” can be reduced to a Procrustean bed situation!