Top 18 Quotes by Benoit Mandelbrot

For much of my life there was no place where the things I wanted to investigate were of interest to anyone.

I was in an industrial laboratory because academia found me unsuitable.

Until a few years ago, the topics in my Ph.D. were unfashionable, but they are very popular today.

Now that I near 80, I realize with wistful pleasure that on many occasions I was 10, 20, 40, even 50 years ahead of my time.

Most were beginning to feel they had learned enough to last for the rest of their lives. They remained mathematicians, but largely went their own way.

My fate has been that what I undertook was fully understood only after the fact.

The techniques I developed for studying turbulence, like weather, also apply to the stock market.

Think of color, pitch, loudness, heaviness, and hotness. Each is the topic of a branch of physics.

A cloud is made of billows upon billows upon billows that look like clouds. As you come closer to a cloud you don't get something smooth, but irregularities at a smaller scale.

When the weather changes, nobody believes the laws of physics have changed. Similarly, I don't believe that when the stock market goes into terrible gyrations its rules have changed.