“The aim of the wise is not to secure pleasure, but to avoid pain.” – Aristotle

"My wealth has come from a combination of living in America, some lucky genes, and compound interest." – Warren Buffett

“When a management team with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact.” – 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

“Most people get interested in stocks when everyone else is. The time to get interested is when no one else is. You can’t buy what is popular and do well.” – Warren Buffett

“Only buy something that you’d be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years.” – Warren Buffett 

"It has often and confidently been asserted, that man's origina can never be known: but ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science."  –  Charles Darwin

“Evidently stockholders have forgotten more than to look at balance sheets.  They have forgotten also that they are owners of a business and not merely owners of a quotation on the stock ticker.  It is time, and high time, that the millions of American shareholders turned their eyes from the daily market reports long enough to give some attention to the enterprises themselves of which they are the proprietors, and which exist for their benefit and at their pleasure.” – Benjamin Graham

“we have complaints that institutional dominance of the stock market has put ‘the small investor at a disadvantage because he can’t compete with the trust companies’ huge resources, etc.  The facts are quite the opposite.  It may be that the institutions are better equipped than the individual to speculate in the market….But I am convinced that an individual investor with sound principles, and soundly advised, can do distinctly better over the long pull than large institutions.” – Benjamin Graham

“I think the future of equities will be roughly the same as their past; in particular, common-stock purchase will prove satisfactory when made at appropriate price levels.  It may be objected that is far too cursory and superficial a conclusion; that it fails to take into account the new factors and problems that have entered the economic picture in recent years—especially those of inflation, unprecedently high interest rates, the energy crisis, the ecology-pollution mess and even the movement towards less consumption and zero growth.  Perhaps I should add to my list the widespread public mistrust of Wall Street as a whole, engendered by its well-nigh scandalous behavior during recent years in the areas of ethics, financial practices of all sorts and plain business sense.” – Benjamin Graham

“To establish the right price for a stock, the market must have adequate information, but it by no means follows that is the market has this information it will thereupon establish the right price.” – Benjamin Graham

“Knowledge is only one ingredient on arriving at a stock’s proper price.  The other ingredient, fully as important as information, is sound judgment.” – Benjamin Graham 

“there is a tendency in part of Wall Street people to pay excessive attention to the most recent figures and the present financial picture.” – Benjamin Graham

“Real investment risk is measured not by the percent that a stock may decline in price in relation to the general market in a given period, but by the danger of a loss of quality and earnings power through economic changes or deterioration in management.”– Benjamin Graham

Under threats to Equity Values, particularly talking about the risk of government intervention in markets: “… the loss of public confidence in the financial community growing out of its own conduct in recent years.  I insist that more damage has been done to stock values and to the future of equities from inside Wall Street than from outside Wall Street.” – Benjamin Graham

“When you grow up you tend to get told the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family, have fun, save a little money. That's a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you'll never be the same again.” – Steve Jobs

“Live your life as though every act were to become a universal law.” –Immanuel Kant

"A fluke is one of the most common fish in the sea, so if you go fishing for a fluke, chances are you just might catch one." – Kevin in the Office

“There is only one side to the stock market; and it is not the bull side or the bear side, but the right side.” – Jesse Livermore

"Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one." – Charles Mackay

“I think the notion that liquidity of tradable common stock is a great contributor to capitalism is mostly twaddle.  The liquidity gives us these crazy booms, so it has as many problems as virtues.” –Charlie Munger

“I like working and understanding what works and what doesn’t in human systems. To me, that’s not optional. That’s a moral obligation. If you’re capable of understanding the world, you have a moral obligation to become rational. I don’t see how you become rational hoarding gold. Even if it works, you’re a jerk.” – Charlie Munger

"For some odd reason, I had an early and extreme multidisciplinary cast of mind. I couldn’t stand reaching for a small idea in my own discipline when there was a big idea right over the fence in somebody else’s discipline. So I just grabbed in all directions for the big ideas that would really work." – Charlie Munger

“I hate to lose more than I love to win.” – Bill Parcells/Vince Lombardi

"If you can heal the symptoms, but not affect the cause, it's quite a bit like trying to heal a gunshot wound with gauze." – Phish

“I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance.” – Socrates 

“Markets are constantly in a state of uncertainty and flux and money is make by discounting the obvious and betting on the unexpected.” – George Soros

“The financial markets generally are unpredictable. So that one has to have different scenarios... The idea that you can actually predict what's going to happen contradicts my way of looking at the market.” – George Soros

"When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him." -- Jonathan Swift 

“Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the unexplored forests and meadows which surround it.  We need the tonic of wilderness….At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things by mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable.  We can never have enough nature.  We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible, vigor, vast and Titanic features….We need to witness our limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander….I love to see that Nature is so rife with life that myriads can be afforded to be sacrificed and suffered to prey on one another….With the liability to accident, we must see how little account is to be made of it.  The impression made on a wise man is that of universal innocence.” – From Walden, by Henry David Thoreau.

“In this country we’re unprecedentedly safe, comfortable, and well fed, with more and better venues for stimulation. And yet if you were asked, ‘Is this a happy or unhappy country?’ you’d check the ‘unhappy’ box. We’re living in an era of emotional poverty, which is something that serious drug addicts feel most keenly.” – David Foster Wallace

"What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing." -- Oscar Wilde