Investing Quotes & Principles

“Understanding how to be a good investor makes you a better business manager and vice versa… If you do not understand the actual business of the company, you cannot understand the value of assets related to that business.” - Charlie Munger

On Investing

“Wall Street never changes, because human nature never changes.” - Jesse Livermore

“Far more money has been lost by investors preparing for corrections or trying to anticipate corrections than has been lost in corrections themselves.” - Peter Lynch

“The four most expensive words in the English language are: This time it’s different.” - John Templeton

“Bull markets are born on pessimism.” - John Templeton

“Time is the friend of the wonderful company, the enemy of the mediocre.” - Warren Buffett

“It’s far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price, than a fair company at a wonderful price.” - Warren Buffett

“The most important quality for an investor is temperament, not intellect. You need a temperament that neither derives great pleasure from being with the crowd or against the crowd.” - Warren Buffett

“Diversification is protection against ignorance. It makes little sense if you know what you are doing.” - Warren Buffett (or Charlie Munger?)

“Opportunities come infrequently. When it rains gold, put out the bucket, not the thimble.”

“After 25 years of buying and supervising a great variety of businesses, Charlie [Munger] and I have not learned how to solve difficult business problems. What we have learned is to avoid them.” - Warren Buffett

“What we learn from history is that people don’t learn from history.” - Warren Buffett

“Predicting rain doesn’t count, building the ark does.” - Warren Buffett

“It’s better to hang out with people better than you. Pick out associates whose behavior is better than yours and you’ll drift in that direction.” - Warren Buffett

“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.” - Warren Buffett

“Lose money for the firm, and I will be understanding. Lose a shred of reputation for the firm, and I will be ruthless.” - Warren Buffett

“Basically, when you get to my age, you’ll really measure your success in life by how many of the people you want to have love you actually do love you.” - Warren Buffett

“You only have to do a very few things right in your life so long as you don’t do too many things wrong.” - Warren Buffett

“If you’re in the luckiest 1% of humanity, you owe it to the rest of humanity to think about the other 99%.” - Warren Buffett

“The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything.” - Warren Buffett

“In the world of business, the people who are most successful are those who are doing what they love.” - Warren Buffett

“Tell me who your heroes are and I’ll tell you who you’ll turn out to be.” - Warren Buffett

“The best thing I did was to choose the right heroes.” - Warren Buffett

“The chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.” - Bertrand Russell and others

“The most important investment you can make is in yourself.” - Warren Buffett

“I insist on a lot of time being spent, almost every day, to just sit and think. That is very uncommon in American business. I read and think. So I do more reading and thinking, and make less impulse decisions than most people in business.” - Warren Buffett

“Read 500 pages like this every day. That’s how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest. All of you can do it, but I guarantee not many of you will do it.” – Warren Buffett

“It’s remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid instead of trying to be very intelligent.” - Charlie Munger

“If you are an investor, you are trying to understand the value of the asset. By contrast, a speculator is trying to guess the price of the asset by predicting the behavior of others in the future… When speculators spend their time trying to guess what other speculators are trying to guess, the process quickly becomes both circular and absurd.” - Charlie Munger

“Mimicking the herd invites regression to the mean.” - Charlie Munger

“A year in which you do not change your mind on some big idea that is important to you is a wasted year.” - Charlie Munger

“The smarter you think you are, the more you may get into trouble trying to predict things that are not predictable.” - Charlie Munger

“I would argue passion is more important than brain power.” - Charlie Munger

“Passionate people tend to work harder and invest more effort in achieving their goals. They read more and think more. They discuss their ideas more. They have an informational edge over those who are less passionate.” - Charlie Munger?

“If you’re playing a zero sum game, whoever is most passionate will have an edge, and whoever is less passionate will likely lose eventually.”

“Warren and I have left a lot of more talented and diligent people in the dust, just by working hard at eliminating standard error.” - Charlie Munger

“The key to long life is to know where you’re going to die and then never going there.” - Unknown

“Academics have done a terrible disservice to intelligent investors by glorifying the idea of diversification. It emphasizes feeling good about not having your investment results depart very much from average investment results.” - Charlie Munger

“If our predictions have been a little better than other people’s, it’s because we’ve tried to make fewer of them.” - Charlie Munger

“The difference between a good business and a bad business is that good businesses throw up one easy decision after another. The bad businesses throw up painful decisions time after time.” - Charlie Munger

“In any big business, you don’t worry whether someone is doing something wrong. You worry about whether it’s big and whether it’s material.” - Charlie Munger

“Our success has come from the lack of oversight we’ve provided, and our success will continue from a lack of oversight. But if you’re going to provide minimal oversight, you have to buy [or hire] carefully.” - Charlie Munger

“On average, betting on the quality of the business is better than betting on the quality of management.” - Charlie Munger

“You have to look at the brand as a promise to the customer that we are going to offer the quality and service that is expected.” - Warren Buffett

“In many areas of the market, there will be a loser for every winner, so, on average, investors will get the return of the market less fees.” - John Bogle, Founder of Vanguard

“For a security to be mispriced, someone else must be a fool.” - Charlie Munger

“The idea that everyone can have wonderful results from stocks is inherently crazy. Nobody expects everyone to succeed at poker.” - Charlie Munger

“If you can’t beat the market, be the market. [by owning index funds]” - Seth Klarman

“You don’t have to hire out your thinking if you keep it simple.” - Charlie Munger