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Charles Dickens: Conventional idea
“I have known a vast quantity of nonsense talked about bad men not looking you in the face. Don’t trust that conventional idea. Dishonesty will stare honesty out of countenance, any day in the week, if there is anything to be got by it.” —Charles Dickens.
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Fred Smith: Common trait
“The common trait of people who supposedly have vision is that they spend a lot of time reading and gathering information, and then they synthesize it until they come up with an idea.”—Fred Smith, Overnight Success: Federal Express and Frederick Smith, Its Renegade Creator.
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Viktor Frankl: Don’t aim at success
“Don’t aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication…In the long run—in the long run, I say!—success will follow you…
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Adlai Stevenson II: Not a free man
“A hungry man is not a free man.” —Adlai Stevenson II.
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Charlie Munger: Foolish projection on a desk
“Usually, I don’t use formal projections. I don’t let people do them for me because I don’t like throwing up on the desk (laughter), but I see them made in a very foolish way all the time, and many people believe in them, no matter how foolish they are. It’s an effective sales technique in…
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Carl Weathers: Don’t wait for the perfect moment
“Don’t wait for the perfect moment, take the moment and make it perfect.” —Carl Weathers.
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Georg Brandes: Hot metal
“Poor is the power of the lead that becomes bullets compared to the power of the hot metal that becomes type.” —Georg Brandes.
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Malcolm Forbes: Fact and fiction
“Anyone who says businessmen deal only in facts, not fiction, has never read old five-year projections.” —Malcolm Forbes.
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Chris Bloomstran: Durable earning power
“The value investor attempts to measure the durable earning power a business can produce over time and determines a fair or bargain price for the enterprise. There are myriad ways to skin a cat, but those in the value corner occasionally find situations where either profits can expand faster than revenues or where the price…
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Havelock Ellis: Absence of flaw
“The absence of flaw in beauty is itself a flaw.” —Havelock Ellis.
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Captain D Michael Abrashoff: Always a better way to do things
‘I began with the idea that there is always a better way to do things, and that, contrary to tradition, the crew’s insights might be more profound than even the captain’s. Accordingly, we spent several months analyzing every process on the ship. I asked everyone, ‘Is there a better way to do what you do?’…
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Frederick Douglass: Power concedes nothing
“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them.” —Frederick Douglass.
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Michael Crichton: Forget yourself
“If you want to be happy, forget yourself. Forget all of it—how you look, how you feel, how your career is going. Just drop the whole subject of you…People dedicated to something other than themselves—helping family and friends, or a political cause, or others less fortunate than they—are the happiest people in the world.” —Michael…
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Zane Grey: Be great
“To bear up under loss, to fight the bitterness of defeat and the weakness of grief, to be victor over anger, to smile when tears are close, to resist evil men and base instincts, to hate hate and to love love, to go on when it would seem good to die, to seek ever after…
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Seth Klarman: Biggest fear
“For years, when someone asked me what my biggest fear was as an investor in managing my portfolio, my answer was that it was buying too soon on the way down from often very overvalued levels. I knew a market collapse was possible. And sometimes, I imagined that I was back in 1930 after the…
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Franklin D Roosevelt: Human kindness
“Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough.” —Franklin D. Roosevelt.
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Seth Klarman: Information
“Information generally follows the well-known 80/20 rule: the first 80 percent of the available information is gathered in the first 20 percent of the time spent. The value of in-depth fundamental analysis is subject to diminishing marginal returns. Most investors strive fruitlessly for certainty and precision, avoiding situations in which information is difficult to obtain.…
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Edward Abbey: Find another line of work
“It is my belief that the writer, the free-lance author, should be and must be a critic of the society in which he lives. It is easy enough, and always profitable, to rail away at national enemies beyond the sea, at foreign powers beyond our borders who question the prevailing order. But the moral duty…
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Rodney Mullen: For the sake of it
“I see a lot of people with talent but the one thing they don’t have is that just love of doing it for the sake of it.” — Rodney Mullen.
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Colette: Destroy most of it
“Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you’re a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff’s worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.” —Colette.
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Randall Stutman: Willing to be bad
“You’re only as good as you’re willing to be bad…The fact that you’re not going to be good at something or that you’re going to fail at something—that’s OK. Because you’re never going to get good unless you’re willing to be bad.”—Randall Stutman.
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Stephen King: When you write
“When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story. When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.”— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft.
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Ellen DeGeneres: Catch-and-release
“Catch-and-release, that’s like running down pedestrians in your car and then, when they get up and limp away, saying —Off you go! That’s fine. I just wanted to see if I could hit you.” —Ellen DeGeneres.
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Stanley Druckenmiller: Envision the future
“Every event in the world affects some security somewhere. You’re constantly trying to figure out the puzzle and envision the world as it might be, as opposed to it his way now. It’s been a love affair from the day I got in the business…. If you envision the future, and you’re wrong, it’s not…
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William Somerset Maugham: Weak men
“Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one’s mind.” —William Somerset Maugham.
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Benjamin Graham & David Dodd: Adequate value
“The essential point is that security analysis does not seek to determine exactly what is the intrinsic value of a given security. It needs only to establish that the value is adequate – e.g., to protect a bond or to justify a stock purchase or else that the value is considerably higher or considerably lower…
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Edith Wharton: What marriage is for
“I begin to see what marriage is for. It’s to keep people away from each other. Sometimes I think that two people who love each other can be saved from madness only by the things that come between them: children, duties, visits, bores, relations, the things that protect married people from each other.” —Edith Wharton.
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Seth Klarman: Precise doesn’t mean accurate
“Many investors insist on affixing exact values to their investments, seeking precision in an imprecise world, but business value cannot be precisely determined…. Any attempt to value businesses with precision will yield values that are precisely inaccurate. The problem is that it is easy to confuse the capability to make precise forecasts with the ability…
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Stendhal: It does not matter
“If you don’t love me, it does not matter, anyway I can love for both of us.” —Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle).
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Lucius Annaeus Seneca: Wise by chance
“No man was ever wise by chance.” —Lucius Annaeus Seneca.
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Lord Byron: Only just
“He who is only just is cruel. Who on earth could live were all judged justly?” —Lord Byron.
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Seth Klarman: Margin of safety
“Because investing is as much an art as a science, investors need a margin of safety. A margin of safety is achieved when securities are purchased at prices sufficiently below underlying value to allow for human error, bad luck, or extreme volatility in a complex, unpredictable, and rapidly changing world. According to Graham, ‘The margin…
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Ethan Allen: Gods
“The gods of the valley are not the gods of the hills.” —Ethan Allen.
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Robert Anton Wilson: B.S.
“Everyone has a belief system, B.S., the trick is to learn not to take anyone’s B.S. too seriously, especially your own.” —Robert Anton Wilson.
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Benjamin Franklin: Half the truth
“Half the truth is often a great lie.” —Benjamin Franklin.
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Seth Klarman: Far more volume
“You must buy on the way down. There is far more volume on the way down than on the way back up, and far less competition among buyers. It is almost always better to be too early than too late, but you must be prepared for price markdowns on what you buy.” —Seth Klarman.
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English proverb: Hundred schoolmasters
“One father is more than a hundred schoolmasters.” —English Proverb.
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Thomas Jefferson: Tranquility and occupation
“It is neither wealth nor splendor, but tranquility and occupation which give happiness.” —Thomas Jefferson.
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Martin Luther King Jr: Put your faith in the nonconformist
“The hope of a secure and livable world lies with disciplined nonconformists, who are dedicated to justice, peace, and brotherhood. The trailblazers in human, academic, scientific, and religious freedom have always been nonconformists. In any cause that concerns the progress of mankind, put your faith in the nonconformist!” —Martin Luther King, Jr.
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Peter D Kaufman: Money is not changing hands
“We tend to take every precaution to safeguard our material possessions because we know what they cost. But at the same time we neglect things which are much more precious because they don’t come with price tags attached: The real value of things like our eyesight or relationships or freedom can be hidden to us,…
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Jane Welsh Carlyle: Great injustice
“When one has been threatened with a great injustice, one accepts a smaller as a favour.” —Jane Welsh Carlyle.
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Howard Marks: Uncommon strength
“When money is easy, few people opt to sit out the dance…. When faced with the choice between (a) maintaining high standards and missing deals and (b) making risky investments, most people will choose the latter. Professional investment managers especially may fear the consequences of idiosyncratic behavior that’s bound to look wrong for a while.…
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Carl Jung: The world will tell you
“The world will ask you who you are, and if you don’t know, the world will tell you.”—Carl Jung.
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Haruki Murakami: People’s memories
“People’s memories are maybe the fuel they burn to stay alive.” —Haruki Murakami.
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Damon Darrel: Every decision has a consequence
“Every decision has a consequence.” — Damon Darrel.
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Andrew McAfee: One big data problem
“The world is one big data problem.” —Andrew McAfee.
