There are two types of people: those who try to win and those who try to win arguments. They are never the same.
Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg didn't finish college. Too much emphasis is placed on formal education - I told my children not to worry about their grades but to enjoy learning.
Never take advice from anyone in a tie. They'll bankrupt you. Don't ask a general for advice on war, and don't ask a broker for advice on money.
You are rich if and only if money you refuse tastes better than money you accept.
If you take risks and face your fate with dignity, there is nothing you can do that makes you small; if you don't take risks, there is nothing you can do that makes you grand, nothing.
Globalization has created this interlocking fragility. At no time in the history of the universe has the cancellation of a Christmas order in New York meant layoffs in China.
Success is about honour, feeling morally calibrated, absence of shame, not what some newspaper defines from an external metric.
I'm in favour of religion as a tamer of arrogance. For a Greek Orthodox, the idea of God as creator outside the human is not God in God's terms. My God isn't the God of George Bush.
Never think that lack of variability is stability. Don't confuse lack of volatility with stability, ever.
The best philosophers were not academics, but had another job, so their philosophy was not corrupted by careerism.
We know from chaos theory that even if you had a perfect model of the world, you'd need infinite precision in order to predict future events. With sociopolitical or economic phenomena, we don't have anything like that.
Alan Greenspan is unskilled; you don't take the unskilled seriously.
Writing is sacred, other activities are profane, and I don't want them to corrupt my writing.
Failure saves lives. In the airline industry, every time a plane crashes the probability of the next crash is lowered by that. The Titanic saved lives because we're building bigger and bigger ships. So these people died, but we have effectively improved the safety of the system, and nothing failed in vain.
Banking is a very treacherous business because you don't realize it is risky until it is too late. It is like calm waters that deliver huge storms.
If you are an Arabic-speaking, Greek-Orthodox going to a French school it makes you deeply sceptical if you have to listen to three different accounts of the Crusades - one from the Muslim side, one from the Greek side and one from the Catholic side.
I drive a hybrid, moving into an electric car. I only drink tap water, never consume food that's travelled.
The key to wealth is that it doesn't matter. Once you've had it, you don't think anything of it; you can wear cheap watches.
Poverty is clearly one source of emotional suffering, but there are others, like loneliness.
The next time you experience a blackout, take some solace by looking at the sky. You will not recognize it.
