Charlie Munger Sayings on Investment: Lessons for Life

1. Investing is where you find a few great companies and then sit on your ass.
2. The big money is not in buying or selling, but in the waiting.
3. Like Warren, I had a considerable passion to get rich, not because I wanted Ferrari's - I wanted the independence. I desperately wanted it.
4. We have a passion for keeping things simple.
5. Assume life will be really tough, and then ask if you can handle it. If the answer is yes, you've won.
6. Think of the basic intellectual dishonesty that comes when you start talking about adjusted EBITDA. You're almost announcing you're a flake.
7. If investing wasn't hard, everyone would be rich.
8. You don't have to be brilliant, only a little bit wiser than the other guys, on average, for a long, long time.
9. The desire to get rich fast is pretty dangerous.
10. Those who keep learning will keep rising in life.
11. There is no way you can live an adequate life without making mistakes.
12. Acknowledging what you don't know is the dawning of wisdom.
13. No wise pilot, no matter how great his talent and experience, fails to use a checklist.
14. There is no better teacher than history in determining the future. There are answers worth billions of dollars in 30$ history books.
15. A lot of people with high IQs are terrible investors because they've got terrible temperaments.
16. It's waiting that helps you as an investor and a lot of people just can't stand to wait.
17. A lot of success in life and business comes from knowing what you want to avoid: early death, a bad marriage, ...
18. One of the greatest ways to avoid trouble is to keep it simple... the system often goes out of control.
19. Knowing what you don't know is more useful than being brilliant.
20. If a business earns 18% on capital over 20 or 30 years, even if you pay an expensive looking price, you’ll end up with a fine result.
21. Knowing what you don't know is more useful than being brilliant.
22. If a business earns 18% on capital over 20 or 30 years, even if you pay an expensive looking price, you’ll end up with a fine result.
23. Forgetting your mistakes is a terrible error if you’re trying to improve your cognition. Reality doesn’t remind you. Why not celebrate stupidities in both categories?
24. You need patience, discipline, and agility to take losses and adversity without going crazy.
25. Everywhere there is a large commission, there is a high probability of a rip-off.
26. It takes character to sit with all that cash and to do nothing. I didn't get to the top where I am by going after mediocre opportunities.
27. We both (Warren Buffett) insist on a lot of time being available almost every day to just sit and think. That is very uncommon in American business. We read and think.
28. Another thing, of course, is that life will have terrible blows in it, horrible blows, unfair blows. It doesn't matter. And some people recover and others don't.
29. Live within your income and save so you can invest. Learn what you need to learn.
30. Develop into a lifelong self-learner through voracious reading; cultivate curiosity and strive to become a little wiser every day.
31. I would argue that passion is more important than brainpower.
32. A great business at a fair price is superior to a fair business at a great price.
33. Our game is to recognize a big idea when it comes along when one doesn't come along very often.
34. Simplicity has a way of improving performance by enabling us to better understand what we are doing.
35. In my whole life, I have known no wise people who didn't read all the time - none, zero. You'd be amazed at how much Warren reads -at how much I read. They think I'm a book with a couple of legs sticking out.
36. Remember that reputation and integrity are your most valuable assets and can be lost in a heartbeat.
37. We recognized early on that smart people do very dumb things, and we wanted to know why and who, so that we could avoid them.
38. I met the towering intellectuals in books, not in classroom, which is natural. My family was into all that stuff, getting ahead through discipline, knowledge, and self-control.
39. Some people are extraordinarily good at knowing the limits of their knowledge because they have to be.
40. Opportunity comes to the prepared mind.
41. Remember that reputation and integrity are your most valuable assets and can be lost in a heartbeat.
42. We recognized early on that smart people do very dumb things, and we wanted to know why and who, so that we could avoid them.
43. I met the towering intellectuals in books, not in classroom, which is natural. My family was into all that stuff, getting ahead through discipline, knowledge, and self-control.
44. Some people are extraordinarily good at knowing the limits of their knowledge because they have to be.
45. Opportunity comes to the prepared mind.
46. To this day, I have never taken a course anywhere, in chemistry, economics, psychology, or business.
47. If something is too hard, we move on to something else. What could be more simpler than that?
48. The best thing a human can do is to help another human being know more.
49. Most people are too fretful, they worry too much. Success means being very patient, but aggressive when it's time.
50. The first rule of compounding: Never interrupt it unnecessarily.
51. I think that one should recognize the reality even when one doesn't like it; indeed, especially when one doesn't like it.
52. One person told me,"I have a list of 300 potentially attractive stocks & I constantly track them, waiting for just one of them to get cheap enough to buy." Well, that's a reasonable thing to do. But how many people have that kind of discipline? Not one in 100.
53. People calculate too much and think too little. Thinking is a surprisingly underrated activity in investing. People who cannot be alone with their own thoughts for a long time are terrible candidates to become successful investors.
54. We don’t care about quarterly earnings and are unwilling to manipulate in any way to make some quarter look better.
55. To get what you want, you have to deserve what you want. The world is not yet a crazy enough place to reward a whole bunch of undeserving people.
56. The iron rule of nature is: you get what you reward for. If you want ants to come, you put sugar on the floor.
57. All I want to know is where I'm going to die so I'll never go there.
58. Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when you woke up. Day by day, and at the end of the day-if you live long enough-like most people, you will get out of life what you deserve.
59. The best armor of old age is a well-spent life perfecting it.
60. How to find a good spouse? The best single way is to deserve a good spouse.
61. Two thirds of acquisitions don’t work. Ours work because we don’t try to do acquisitions — we wait for no-brainers.
62. The first rule of a happy life is low expectations. If you have unrealistic expectations, you’re going to be miserable your whole life. You want to have reasonable expectations and take life’s results good and bad as they happen with a certain amount of stoicism.