The bed of procrustes - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

In this profound and playful book, Nassim Nicholas Taleb presents his ideas about life in the form of aphorisms, the world's earliest - and most memorable - literary form.

Procrustes was a
character from Greek mythology who abducted travellers and invited them to
spend the night in a special bed, which they had to fit to perfection. They never did. Those who were too tall had their legs chopped off; those who were too short were stretched.

Every aphorism
here is about a Procrustean bed of sorts - we humans, facing the limits of our
knowledge, the unseen and the unknown, resolve the tension by squeezing life
and the world into crisp commoditized ideas, reductive categories, specific
vocabularies and pre-packaged narratives. Only by embracing the unexpected -
and accepting what we don't know - can we see the world as it really
is.