Great Quotes

Kindness is paying attention out loud.

Alpha is a function of neglect.

In my end is my beginning.

A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.

Without human direction, compute runs in circles.

Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just go to work.

AI will explode the myth that humans are widgets.

Education is not the filling of buckets but the lighting of fires.

You can feel quality.

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.

Routine is the thief of time. If your year feels like it vanished, it’s because it was boring. Novelty expands your life.

Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.

Perseverance is a great element of success. If you only knock long enough and loud enough at the gate, you are sure to wake up somebody.

Your thoughts construct patterns like scaffolding in your mind. You are really etching chemical patterns. In most cases, people get stuck in those patterns, just like grooves in a record, and they never get out of them.

Software 1.0 easily automates what you can specify. Software 2.0 easily automates what you can verify.

At scale, nothing is a commodity.

The instagram generation experiences the present moment as an anticipated memory.

Quality is habit.

The difference between hearing and listening is attention.

A moat today is simply a temporary buffer that helps a company get ahead of the next innovation cycle.

Luck is when preparation meets opportunity.

Taste is how you teach the world to treat your attention.

Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting a tomato in a fruit salad. Philosophy is wondering whether ketchup is a smoothie.

The obvious is obviously wrong.

The world is overweight easily understood data and underweight everything else.

The world is overweight easily observed data and underweight everything else.

We must all suffer from one of two pains: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret.

If my life is fruitless, it doesn’t matter who praises me. And if my life is fruitful, it doesn’t matter who criticizes me.

Anxiety, I’ve come to realize, is a very expensive habit.

We are more often frightened than hurt; and we suffer more in imagination than in reality.

Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one.

To be conscious that you are ignorant is a great step to knowledge.

Make sure the cathedral is not taken over by the casino.

Don't be patient about acting on deals that make sense.

The great pleasure in this business (investing) is having people trust you.

Your brain would turn to mush if you didn't have a few problems.

The world is not going to adapt to you; you need to adapt to the world.

What you trade your attention for is what your life becomes.

Truth waits for eyes unclouded by longing.

The most important quality of an investor is temperament, not intellect.

The young man knows the rules; the old man knows the exceptions.

A wise man learns by the mistakes of others; a fool by his own.

It’s not what you look at that matters. It’s what you see.

Remember, no investment is forever.

Well bought is half sold.

The creative mind can solve problems. The serious mind just worries.

Drawdowns are only bad if you can’t take advantage of them.

The most important organ in investing is the stomach, not the brain.

Communication systems are also transportation systems. Some media are particularly good at transporting information across space, while others are particularly good at transporting it through time.

Patience, I believe, is a core competency of a healthy civilization.

Everyone wants to be interesting, but the vitalizing thing is to be interested. Keep a sense of curiosity. Discover new things.

Boredom is the secret ailment of large-scale organizations.

People of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.

If I were given one hour to save the planet, I would spend 55 minutes defining the problem and five minutes solving it.

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

The greatest terror a child can have is that he is not loved, and rejection is the hell he fears. I think everyone in the world to a large or small extent has felt rejection. And with rejection comes anger, and with anger some kind of crime in revenge for the rejection, and with the crime guilt — and there is the story of mankind.

What are the best tools to quiet the nervous system and ego and see reality clearly?

If most investment analysts and portfolio managers actually have high conviction in 1-5 situations/investments, is it possible to unbundle the hedge fund and let the system self organize somehow?

What’s the next wave of alternative investment partnerships going to look like?

How do we accelerate the process of building mutual trust?

Happy people love people, use things, and worship the divine. Unhappy people use people, love things, and worship themselves.

We have to invest in the world we live in, and not the world we want.

If you always put limits on everything you do, physical or anything else, it will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them.

Always do what you are afraid to do.

The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.

All courses of action are risky, so prudence is not in avoiding danger (it's impossible), but calculating risk and acting decisively. Make mistakes of ambition and not mistakes of sloth. Develop the strength to do bold things, not the strength to suffer.

Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement… get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.

If you only wished to be happy, this could be easily accomplished; but we wish to be happier than other people, and this is always difficult, for we believe others to be happier than they are.

It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than “Try to be a little kinder.”

Once we realise that imperfect understanding is the human condition there is no shame in being wrong, only in failing to correct our mistakes.

Change is never painful, only the resistance to change is painful.

Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.

It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.

The highly curious person is the apex predator in a post AI world.

If the path before you is clear, you’re probably on someone else’s.

Madness is the result not of uncertainty but of certainty.

Doubt is an uncomfortable condition, but certainty is a ridiculous one.

The world of color is infinite, as is the world of sound. And it is only by stopping fixing conceptions on the world of color and the world of sound that you really begin to hear it and see it.

As you go the way of life, you will see a great chasm. Jump. It is not as wide as you think.

The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.

Action produces information.

That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange aeons even death may die.

My how the days go, always full of something, something beautiful, if you’re paying close enough attention.

Philosophy is a largely a matter of solving problems created by philosophy.

In the Left Hemisphere world the future is a fantasy under our control. And all will be well because we’ll be able to solve all the problems we’re just now creating.

You may reasonably expect a man to walk a tightrope safely for ten minutes; it would be unreasonable to do so without accident for two hundred years.

We will need to embrace continual mistake-making and correcting…nature’s learning process. We will need to surrender the personal need for control…that resides in all of us.

Nature does not hurry. Yet everything is accomplished.

If I need things to be a certain way, I’m held hostage by them.

Learn what is to be taken seriously and laugh at the rest.

People return to the part of the song they love. That’s what keeps them coming back.

The ear goes to the irritant.

Attention is a moral act...and attention changes the world. If you attend to it in a certain way, you see certain things. If you attend in another way you see quite different things and therefore attention helps, our consciousness helps, to bring into existence the experiential world, which is the only world that we can ever know.

No one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away…the span of someone's life is only the core of their actual existence.

AI takes abundance to infinity, and Meta is the purest play of all.

I don’t have to be right. I just want to be the least wrong.

We now see from Beethoven's notebooks that he gradually assembled the most glorious melodies and, to a degree, selected them out of disparate beginnings…The artist who separates less rigorously, liking to rely on his imitative memory, can in some circumstances become a great improviser; but artistic improvisation stands low in relation to artistic thoughts earnestly and laboriously chosen. All great men were great workers, untiring not only in invention but also in rejecting, sifting, reforming, arranging.

Everyone is jealous of what you’ve got. No one is jealous of how you got it.

There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.

“My ideological framework had been, ‘What’s the next step? How do I make my gaming PC better? How do I upgrade it?’” he told me. “But then I just had this light bulb moment where I said, ‘Next step doesn’t matter. What’s the last step?’ And that flipped my thinking upside down, because it allowed me to think in just a totally different way about the problem. And I immediately concluded, ‘Oh, it’s virtual reality. It’s the ability to literally feel like you’re inside of a game, as real as the real world. That’s the real purpose of all of this. The next step might be eight monitors instead of six, but the last step is virtual reality. That’s what I’m going to do.’”

We inhabit a world in which reason is needed more than ever before, yet in which reason is so narrowly conceived that it drives out true understanding. For that we would have had to learn respect for the power of intuition, not as opposed to reason, but as both grounding it, and the means for it to fulfill its potential in making judgments in life.

Market breadth is an expression of confidence (and vice versa).

Seriousness is love and curiosity expressed earnestly.

Create a sound that pleases the reader’s ear. Don’t just write words. Write music.

In science if you know what you are doing you should not be doing it. In engineering if you do not know what you are doing, you should not be doing it.

A genius is the one most like himself.

Do not envy success that does not reproduce well.

There is a texture to attention. (like sandpaper…course-grained to fine-grained)

The categorization of things really limits us.

An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field.

Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.

The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.

Limitation creates possibilities.

Every important thing we've done has been misunderstood.

Pessimism can spark an idea. Annoyance can drive ingenuity. Disappointment can redirect effort towards change. But creativity requires optimism.

Don’t let the critic become bigger than the creator.

It doesn’t follow that just because everything is available, that everything of value is understood.

If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.

These hauntingly beautiful lands which somehow never satisfy — this passion to escape from death plus the certainty that life owes all its charm to mortality — these push you on to the real thing because they fill you with desire and yet prove absolutely clearly that in Morris's world that desire cannot be satisfied.

The use of Fashions in thought is to distract the attention of men from their real dangers.

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their life a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

The more you know, the more humble you become.

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex. It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage - to move in the opposite direction.

For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.

The reason the world felt like a better place during your childhood is because you were a child.

Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.

Crypto is the substrate that computers use to pay each other.

Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, is of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.

Mistakes are the portals of discovery.

Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it's a feather bed.

We are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it.

The pessimist criticizes, the optimist creates.

Time heals what reason cannot.

You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.

We don't rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.

The information you consume each day is the soil from which your future thoughts are grown.

“Someday” (“someday I’ll do this, someday I’ll do that”) is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you.

Argue for your limitations and, sure enough, they're yours.

The test of first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

The opportunity cost of reading a newsletter is higher than the price of a subscription.

One deserves what one allows.

The best thing a human being can do is to help another human being know more.

Children spell love T-I-M-E.

Our satisfactory results have been the product of about a dozen truly good decisions – that would be about one every five years.

One is lucky to find just four good investment opportunities at any given time.

Excluding our top 15 or so investments across 70+ years of investing would give us an unremarkable track record.

Ironically enough, the aggregate of profits accruing from this [GEICO] investment decision far exceeded the sum of all the others realized through 20 years of wide-ranging operations…. Are there morals to this story of value to the intelligent investor? ...[One] is that one lucky break, or one supremely shrewd decision – can we tell them apart? – may count for more than a lifetime of journeyman efforts.

Cycles can be reframed as volatile periods around a relatively consistent adoption curve.

Do not ask your children to strive for extraordinary lives. Such striving may seem admirable, but it is the way of foolishness. Help them instead to find wonder and the marvel of an ordinary life. Show them the joy of tasting tomatoes, apples and pears. Show them how to cry when pets and people die. Show them the infinite pleasure in the touch of a hand. And make the ordinary come alive for them. The extraordinary will take care of itself.

Most technology is deterministic. A.I. is probabilistic.

Natural order is deterministic. Social order is probabilistic.

A little learning is a dangerous thing; drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring: there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, and drinking largely sobers us again.

A little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion.

The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.

It’s easier to fool people than to convince them they have been fooled.

In times of change, learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.

Envy is the tax which all distinctions must pay.

It’s hard to get really depressed until your dreams come true. Once your dreams come true and you realize you feel the same way you did before then you get a feeling of hopelessness.

By the time we’ve made it, we’ve had it.

We had about the same amount of fun all the way through. We’re having fun now.

A young man knows the rules. An old man knows the exceptions.

It was never easy. And it’s harder now.

I don’t want to be any more of a guru to people than I already am. It’s getting hard out there.

We thought of life by analogy with a journey, a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end…but we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played.

Freedom is the right to say “no”.

You can’t be spontaneous within reason.

The less confident you are, the more serious you have to act.

The imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man.

We are the masters of the unsaid words, but slaves of those we let slip out.

Nothing so dates an era as its conception of the future.

I never understand anything until I have written about it.

Intellectuals are naturally attracted by the idea of a planned society, in the belief that they will be in charge of it.

A problem well-put is half-solved

I know a lot of people with rings who aren’t champions.

Two of my rules for life: [1] The person that has the most fun wins; [2] the climb is the fun part.

Cloud computing infrastructure is akin to giving every tinkerer in past technological revolutions access to immediately scalable and inexpensive textile mills, steam engines, steel furnaces, moving assembly lines, and microprocessors. Providing the masses the freedom to experiment unlocks the potential of technological breakthroughs in ways that was simply not possible in past technological revolutions.

For any innovator, business, or problem solver, the sum of all human knowledge is only a smartphone away. The implication of this level of connectivity to this depth of knowledge is only just beginning to be realized.

We have gone from thinking that self esteem comes from achievement to thinking that achievement comes from self esteem.

While we try to teach our children all about life, our children teach us what life is all about.

Enjoy the little things in life, for one day you’ll look back and realize they were the big things.

Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.

The way we talk to our children becomes their inner voice.

A good conscience is a continual Christmas.

The Virtue of Industry: Lose no time. Be always employed in something useful. Cut off all unnecessary actions.

Work as if you were to live 100 years. Pray as if you were to die tomorrow.

One today is worth two tomorrows.

He that would catch fish must venture his bait.

To be proud of virtue is to poison yourself with the antidote.

When a friend deals with a friend, let the bargain be clear and well penn’d, that they may continue friends to the end.

The honest man takes pains, and then enjoys pleasures; the knave takes pleasure, and then suffers pains.

Where there is hunger, law is not regarded, and where law is not regarded, there will be hunger.

Most fools think they are only ignorant.

Proportion your charity to the strength of your estate, or God will proportion your estate to the weakness of your charity.

The doors of wisdom are never shut.

Vice knows she’s ugly, so puts on her mask.

Pardoning the bad is injuring the good.

A wise man will desire no more than what he may get justly, use soberly, distribute cheerfully and leave contentedly.

Liberality is not giving much, but giving wisely.

He that doth what he should not shall feel what he would not.

When sense is wanting, everything is wanting.

A long life may not be good enough, but a good life is long enough.

Dost thou love life? Then do not squander Time, for that’s the Stuff Life is made of.

Love your enemies, for they tell you your faults.

A change of fortune hurts a wise man no more than a change of the moon.

‘Tis easier to prevent bad habits than to break them.

The good or ill hap of a good or ill life is the good or ill choice of a good or ill wife.

Great estates may venture more; little boats must keep near shore.

If your riches are yours, why don’t you take them with you to t’other world?

If worldly goods cannot save me from death, they ought not hinder me of eternal life.

I never saw an oft-transplanted tree, Nor yet an oft-removed family, That throve so well as those that settled be.

Calamity and prosperity are the touchstones of integrity.

The wise and brave dares own that he was wrong.

The Golden Age never was the present age.

Reading makes a full man — meditation a profound man — discourse a clear man.

He that can have patience can have what he will.

Since thou art not sure of a minute, throw not away an hour.

The ancients tell us what is best, but we must learn of the moderns what is fittest.

Many a man would have been worse if his estate had been better.

Pray don’t burn my house to roast your eggs.

He that speaks much is much mistaken.

Many a man thinks he is buying pleasure, when he is really selling himself a slave to it.

Forewarned, forearmed.

Sell not virtue to purchase wealth, nor liberty to purchase power.

Read much, but not too many books.

Diligence is the mother of good luck.

Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.

Success has ruined many a man.

Many have quarreled about religion, that never practiced it.

If man could have half his wishes, he would double his troubles.

That behaves best which has grown gradually.

Whatever’s begun in anger ends in shame.

What one relishes, nourishes.

Lost time is never found again.

He that is rich need not live sparingly, and he that can live sparingly need not be rich.

Full of courtesy, full of craft.

Would you persuade, speak of interest, not of reason.

There is no little enemy.

He’s the best physician that knows the worthlessness of the most medicines.

The things which hurt, instruct.

Many complain of their memory, few of their judgement.

Sin is not hurtful because it is forbidden; it is forbidden because it is hurtful.

Learn of the skillful. He that teaches himself hath a fool for his master.

What signifies knowing the names, if you know not the nature of things?

Hide not your talents, they for use were made. What’s a sundial in the shade?

Tho’ modesty is a virtue, bashfulness is a vice.

Content makes poor men rich; discontent makes rich men poor.

Many foxes grow grey, but few grow good.

Little strokes fell great oaks.

Each year one vicious habit rooted out, in time might make the worst man good throughout.

Wink at small faults — remember thou hast great ones.

If you have time, don’t wait for time.

Wish not so much to live long, as to live well.

Observe all men; thyself most.

Drive thy business, or it will drive thee.

Hear Reason, or she’ll make you feel her.

Sloth (like rust) consumes faster than labor wears. The used key is always bright.

What you would seem to be, be really.

Wealth is not his that has it, but his that enjoys it.

Who is rich? He that rejoices in his portion.

Keep thy shop, and thy shop will keep thee.

Necessity never made a good bargain.

Wise men learn by others’ harms; fools by their own.

Keep conscience clear, then never fear.

Well done is better than well said.

They who have nothing to trouble them, will be be troubled at nothing.

If passion drives, let reason hold the reins.

Eat few suppers and you’ll need few medicines.

The whole process [of doing great work] is a kind of dance with curiosity.

Curiosity it the key…in doing great work: it will choose the field for you, get you to the frontier, cause you to notice the gaps in it, and drive you to explore them.

It’s a great thing to be rich in unanswered questions.

There’s a kind of thinking that can only be done by writing.

Rivals exist to inspire you to be better.

Use the difficulty

I made a prosperous voyage when I suffered a shipwreck.

The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false face for the urge to rule it. Power is what all messiahs really seek: not the chance to serve.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

They say, best men are moulded out of faults, And, for the most, become much more the better, For being a little bad.

If you can’t explain it to a six-year-old, you don’t understand it yourself.

You can’t be a good innovator if you don’t know how to make the stuff you are designing.

$ → Generosity

Love is spelled T.I.M.E.

I will have to remember “I am here today to cross the swamp, not to fight all the alligators.”

You can’t change the people around you, but you can change the people around you.

A man is about as big as the things that make him angry.

Character, like a photograph, develops in darkness.

The truth knocks on the door and you say, ‘Go away, I’m looking for the truth,’ and so it goes away. Puzzling.

People fall so in love with their pain, they can’t leave it behind. The same as the stories they tell. We trap ourselves.

I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.

Language can become a screen which stands between the thinker and reality. This is the reason why true creativity often starts where language ends.

Life is long, if you know how to use it.

Socialists don’t like ordinary people choosing, for they might not choose socialism.

If software is a bicycle for the mind, A.I. is an army for the mind to command.

Don’t argue with reality.

The day you sell is reasonably certain to mark the end of the decline, because you are not the only one who was finally scared into selling. You, being an average man, were merely representative.

A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity. An optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.

Beware of looking for goals: look for a way of life. Decide how you want to live and then see what you can do to make a living within that way of life.

The fears we don’t face become our limits.

Only pay attention to signals that are costly (to create), and honest (from good incentives).

A sense of injustice is the biggest limiter of performance.

The job of the poet is to name without narrowing.

Individuation in service of the collective.

If you can choose to add mass or velocity, always choose velocity.

Small teams are magic.

An arch consists of two weaknesses which, leaning one against the other, make a strength.

It is an act of service to ask for help.

The most important things in life have been stumbled upon.

Search, and climb.

Create structure to leave structure.

Discipline = Freedom.

The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.

Planning is overrated. Planting is underrated.

We want AI agents that can discover like we can, not which contain what we have discovered. Building in our discoveries only makes it harder to see how the discovering process can be done.

Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.

The fundamental algorithm of life: repeat what works.

Wisdom is prevention.

The fanatic is always concealing a secret doubt.

Patience is a product of confidence and trust.

Is your glass half empty or half full?" asked the mole. "I think I'm grateful to have a glass," said the boy.

Comparison is the thief of joy.

I’m very concerned that our society is much more interested in information, than wonder. In noise, rather than silence. Oh my, this is a noisy world.

The biggest mistake parents make raising their children is not remembering their own childhood. The best thing that we can do is to think about what it was like for us, and know what our children are going through.

Your children won’t remember the money you spent. Only the time.

Successful investing is about having people agree with you...later.

Self control is strength. Calmness is mastery. You have to get to a point where your mood doesn’t shift based on the insignificant actions of someone else. Don’t allow others to control the direction of your life. Don’t allow your emotions to overpower your intelligence.

Now will never come again.

Thinking is all about the ability to look at complex situations and strip away things that don’t count — the ability to filter out situations and find what’s at their core.

There is only one nature — the division into science and engineering is a human imposition, not a natural one. Indeed, the division is a human failure: it reflects our limited capacity to comprehend the whole.

Don’t imagine having things that you don’t have. Rather, pick the best of the things that you do have and think of how much you would want them if you didn’t have them.

Beware of overconcern for money, or position, or glory. Someday you will meet a man who cares for none of these things. Then you will know how poor you are.

Pressure is a privilege.

If you want to know how to live your life, write your obituary and reverse engineer it.

What gives you opportunities is other people doing dumb things.

In pursuit of wisdom, sometimes it’s better to seek out the richest, most accurately-researched stories.

When trust is broken, chaos reigns.

Escape competition through authenticity

What the pupil must learn, if he learns anything, is that the world will do most of the work for you, provided you cooperate with it by identifying how it really works and aligning with those realities.

Wisdom is tolerance of cognitive dissonance.

Dare to be naïve.

We do not look at cash to determine whether to buy stocks; we look at stocks to determine whether to deploy cash.

If you never miss a plane, you're spending too much time at the airport.

We’ll never run out of money.

It took a long time to focus on very few things.

Anyone who uses the word “quality” is an idiot.

In our frantic attempt to know everything through use of the rational mind alone, we have fractured knowledge into hundreds of incestuous specialties and fragmented those specialties into thousands of isolated, insular trades and disciplines. The world is filling with people who know more and more about less and less. Within each specialty, we dismiss as largely irrelevant all things, events, and ways of understanding outside the ever-narrower boundaries of our discipline. We can ignore all relationships not essential to our ever-narrowing perspective. We can ignore all consequences not immediately affecting or affected by our ever more constricted pursuit. We can abdicate responsibility for even thinking about them. We can each decide and act with our ever-smaller intellectual prisons and narrower mental cells, and defend our acts with logical, efficient, methodical rationality. Never mind that the sum of the whole is social, commercial, and biological madness.

If the path be beautiful, let us not ask where it leads.

You become what you give your attention to.

I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.

Taken to its logical conclusion, [AI chat bot] plugins will provide infinite choice without the Paradox of Choice.

The instinct was to curate a culture, not to teach, not primarily.

History is rarely on the side of the book burners.

Where your fear is, there is your task.

We make our money on the startups that work and we make our reputation on the ones that don’t.

There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart’s desire. The other is to gain it.

I wish everyone could get rich and famous and get everything they ever dreamed for, so they can see it’s not the answer.

After winning the championship I learned that much hadn’t changed. I thought it would fill a certain void. It didn’t.

Mental health is a commitment to reality at all costs.

Imagine how much harder physics would be if electrons had feelings!

You have two ears but only one mouth for a reason.

It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.

You always have the right to have no opinion.

We love ourselves more than other people but for some reason we care about their opinions more than our own.

We suffer more in imagination than in reality.

If you want to be beautiful, make beautiful choices.

To finish first, you first must finish.

People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.

You’ve got to be lucky. Everybody’s going to be lucky at some time or another. The thing I’d say is that I was lucky enough to be lucky early. [unsaid: he kept creating opportunities to be lucky]

I have always felt that the action most worth watching is not at the center of things but where the edges meet. I like shorelines, weather fronts, international borders. There are interesting frictions and incongruities in these places, and often, if you stand at the point of tangency, you can see both sides better than if you were in the middle of either one.

The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.

Money often costs too much.

Genuine curiosity is the precursor to understanding. A good listener helps the other person feel understood.

I never lose. Either I win or learn.

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.

Your calendar is a better measure of success than your bank account.

Action expresses priorities.

As the area of our knowledge grows, so too does the perimeter of our ignorance.

If I need things to be a certain way, I'm held hostage by them.

Strange are the uses of adversity.

When you fall in love with the process rather than the product, you don’t have to wait to give yourself permission to be happy. You can be satisfied anytime your system is running.

What looks like genius may simply be the byproduct of persistence and variety.

Power is influence over external events. Peace is influence over internal events.

The problem with economic forecasting is that the things you can predict tend to not matter and the things you can't predict make all the difference in the world.

You don’t know how easy this game is until you get into that broadcasting booth.

All that matters is to survive. The rest is just words.

Always choose the most difficult way, there you will not meet competitors.

Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first; nationalism, when hate for people other than your own comes first.

The map is not the territory; the territory is the map.

Those who tell the stories rule society.

There is an entire section in bookstores called “self-help” and no section called “how to help others”.

Hardware is the skull. Semiconductors are the brain. Software is the wisdom. Data is the knowledge.

I learned the hard way that the range of uncertainty is also uncertain, and at times it can become practically infinite. (speaking of trading in 2008)

Always remember, your focus determines your reality.

Is it change that a man fears? Why, what can have come to be without change, and what is dearer and more familiar to Universal Nature?

Great people can tolerate ambiguity; they can both believe and disbelieve at the same time.

Do not hold your views too firmly. Every fool is convinced, and everyone fully persuaded is a fool: the more erroneous his judgement the more firmly he holds it.

The world is filling with people who know more and more about less and less.

The western world has been trying to break everything into pieces. But there are no boundaries in Nature. Get out an atlas of the world and search for one of those lines in the dirt. It’s never there…. Boundaries are distinctions in our mind, and some are useful. But they really are not there. If you think deeply about it, you come to realize that there is no perceived boundary that is not equally a connection.

There are two keys to effective communication. The first is deep listening. The second is loving speech.

The ability to destroy your ideas rapidly instead of slowly when the occasion is right is one of the most valuable things. You have to work hard on it.

Motivation affects perception.

The truth awaits eyes unclouded by longing.

The key is not the will to win…everybody has that. It is the will to prepare to win that is important.

Remember that happiness is a way of travel, not a destination.

Time discovers truth.

Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.

Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.

Dialogue is a process to rise from error.

Principles are the territory. Values are maps. When we value correct principles, we have truth — a knowledge of things as they are.

The opposite of a fact is falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth.

If your emotions say “now”, your hands better say “later”. Clarity settles all scores.

Consider your point of view as temporary.

Experience is not what happens to you; it is what you do with what happens to you.

Chance favors the connected mind.

You can’t be normal and expect abnormal results.

Science is organized skepticism; too much of business is disorganized optimism.

We should no more trust executives who solely rely on their experience, than we should trust doctors who ignore clinical trials.

High expectations are the key to everything.

History never repeats itself. Man always does.

Sometimes when you are in a dark place you think you have been buried, but actually you have been planted.

Rule of thumb: The more unsustainable an industry gets, the more it relies on inexperienced workers pulled from less prosperous industries to expand.

Being right is the enemy of staying right because it leads you to forget the way the world works.

Make yourself transparent to the transcendent.

Systems thinking is contextual, which is the opposite of analytical thinking. Analysis means taking something apart in order to understand it; systems thinking means putting it into the context of a larger whole.

It seems, in fact, as though the second half of a person's life is made up of nothing but the habits they accumulated during the first half.

People calculate too much and think too little.

We do not measure a culture by its output of undisguised trivialities but by what it claims as significant.

The "content" of a medium is a juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.

Never allow a person to tell you no who doesn’t have the power to say yes.

Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.

Of course this recent trend greatly influences pundit comments, as many implicitly see their job as explaining to you why what has been happening will now happen forever and was actually really quite obvious before it happened.

Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions.

Make mistakes, just don't make them permanent.

If you're unwilling to adapt to the future, you'll justify the past.

Life is taking time to hit the right notes.

Risk is what’s left over when you think you’ve thought of everything.

We think too much and feel too little.

Fear has a far greater grasp on human action than the impressive weight of historical evidence.

If you make meaning, you’ll make money.

Anything that just costs money is cheap.

Values are like fingerprints. Nobody's are the same, but you leave 'em all over everything you do.

If you can't explain it to a six-year-old, you don't understand it yourself.

Children are joyful and treat each day as a miracle — in part because they are continually surprised. Each day, they hear a new word or listen to a new song or learn about a new animal. It's their first time visiting that restaurant or jumping in that pool or riding that rollercoaster. The world is continually unfolding before them. How can you introduce more surprise into your life as an adult? How can you renew your sense of childlike wonder?

Deconstruction creates knowledge. Recombination creates value.

One of the main obstacles between who you are and who you could be is courage. The courage to keep trying even if you're not yet as good as you hope…despite your fears of what others may think…without knowing how the future will unfold. Your great work is on the other side of your early work. The only way to be exceptional later on is to have the courage to be "just okay" right now. This is how it is for everyone.

Money is a terrible master but an excellent servant.

The very first demand that his religion makes upon him is that he should make good tables.

Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.

It’s not how good you’re doing, it’s how long you’re doing good.

I am easily satisfied with the very best.

Straight roads do not make skillful drivers.

Anyone who acts without paying attention to what he is doing is wasting his life. I'd go so far as to say life is denied by lack of attention, whether it be to cleaning windows or trying to write a masterpiece.

Do not imagine that if you meet a really humble man he will be what most people call ‘humble’ nowadays: he will not be a sort of greasy, smarmy person, who is always telling you that, of course, he is nobody. Probably all you will think about him is that he seemed a cheerful, intelligent chap who took a real interest in what you said to him. If you do dislike him it will be because you feel a little envious of anyone who seems to enjoy life so easily. He will not be thinking about humility: he will not be thinking about himself at all.

I am a big believer in that we design our lives. We are writing a play as we are in it and acting it. You have this universe in front of you that you can ignore it or dance with it.

Doubt kills more dreams than failure ever will.

Between stimulus and response there is space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

We need to redefine "hard work" to include "hard thinking”. The person who outsmarts you is out working you. The person who finds shortcuts is out working you. The person with a better strategy is out working you. Usually, the hardest work is thinking of a better way to do it.

When you see only problems, you’re not seeing clearly.

Signal turns to noise because of arbitrage, but noise turns to signal because of reflexivity.

People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.

I can have a little and you can have a lot.

The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only one page.

Effort eventually should eat itself.

Invest in strength, not in lack of weakness.

It is good for a professional to be reminded that his professionalism is only a husk, that the real person must remain an amateur, a lover of the work.

If the currency isn’t scarce, the things that people actually desire will become scarce.

In the moral catatonic stupor America finds itself in today, it is only disagreement that we seek, and the more virulent that disagreement, the better. This is not who we Americans are or who we want to be. Nor is this America or what we want America to be.

Being human always points, and is directed, to something or someone, other than oneself — be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself — by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love — the more human he is.

And into the forest I go, to lose my mind and find my soul.

Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Build a home with deep emotional resonnance.

Relationships are the currency of life.

We don’t want to pass up on a chance to do something intelligent because of some macro prediction.

Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.

Fools learn from experience. I prefer to learn from the experience of others.

It is not what a man does that is of final importance, but what he is in what he does. The atmosphere produced by a man, much more than his activities, has the lasting influence.

These violent delights have violent ends.

Only increase your position when you can handle your emotions.

When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.

Rather than steering your life to avoid surprises, aim directly for them.

You are as big as the things that make you angry.

When you are stuck, explain your problem to others. Often simply laying out a problem will present a solution. Make “explaining the problem” part of your troubleshooting process.

You will be judged on how well you treat those who can do nothing for you.

About 99% of the time, the right time is right now.

Your growth as a conscious being is measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations you are willing to have.

Productivity is often a distraction. Don’t aim for better ways to get through your tasks as quickly as possible, rather aim for better tasks that you never want to stop doing.

Ask funders for money, and they’ll give you advice; but ask for advice and they’ll give you money.

Don’t ever work for someone you don’t want to become.

Courage is grace under pressure.

Whatever you're meant to do, do it now.

Just as a stock certificate is title to company capital, money is title to human time.

Most geniuses - especially those who lead others - prosper not by deconstructing intricate complexities, but by exploiting unrecognized simplicities.

Selling your winners and holding your losers is like cutting the flowers and watering the weeds.

In stocks – as in romance – ease of divorce is not a sound basis for commitment.

The stock market demands conviction as surely as it victimizes the unconvinced.

There are two pains in life. There is the pain of discipline and the pain of disappointment. If you can handle the pain of discipline, then you'll never have to deal with the pain of disappointment.

The stock market is the only market where things go on sale and all the customers run out of the store.

Past glories are poor feeding.

A man is great not because he hasn't failed; a man is great because failure hasn't stopped him.

To explain to me what you will do, tell me the stories of what you have done.

The turning points of lives are not the great moments. The real crises are often concealed in occurrences so trivial in appearance that they pass unobserved.

If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking.

We must not be frightened nor cajoled into accepting evil as deliverance from evil. We must go on struggling to be human, though monsters of abstraction police and threaten us.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

Quietly yearning for what you don’t have, while dreading losing what you do. For 99.9% of your race, that is the definition of reality. Desire and fear.

Pressure is a reflection of ambition.

We’re always becoming something (for better or worse).

Culture eats strategy for breakfast.

If you hit a wrong note, it’s the next note that you play that determines if it’s good or bad.

How much pain have cost us the evils which have never happened!

If you spend 15 minutes a year worrying about the market, you've wasted 14 minutes.

It is important for people to die. Most people don't change their minds. If we live forever we might become a very ossified society where new ideas cannot succeed.

Beware of unearned wisdom.

How Rockefeller lived to 97: “He avoids all worry. He takes plenty of exercise in open air. And he gets up from the table a little hungry.”

The worst thing you can do is censor yourself as the pencil hits the paper. You must not edit until you get it all on paper. If you can put everything down, stream-of-consciousness, you'll do yourself a service.

Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wishes to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time.

What should exist? To me, that's the most exciting question imaginable. What do we need that we don't have?

I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

Train hard and focus on what you can control.

Most books should just be articles. Most articles should just be blog posts. And most blog posts should just be tweets.

A single conversation with a wise man is worth a month's study of books.

Good judgement comes from experience and experience comes from bad judgement.

Pessimists sound smart. Optimists make money.

The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.

An obsession with security breeds a feeling of insecurity.

Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.

The benefits of focus are immediate; the benefits of synergy are hypothetical.

The trick is not to predict an unknowable future, but to try to understand the present, and the probabilities of the various paths that may evolve from it.

I would rather entertain and hope that people learned something than educate people and hope they were entertained.

What would it be like to become the saintly ancestor of my future happiness?

I have no interest in forecasting the future, only in creating it by acting appropriately in the present.

One of the biggest inhibitors of good decision making is our brain's inability to see things as nonlinear.

The better you get, the harder you work.

People saying: “It can’t be done,” are always being interrupted by somebody doing it.

Teach your children early what you learned late.

We're always shocked that the returns to writing well are really high. And it feels like the world hasn't fully internalized that.

Time, not timing, is key to building wealth in the stock market.

One of the only true shortcuts in life is finding an expert and apprenticing under them.

A small act is worth a million thoughts.

Don’t pay any attention to what they write about you. Just measure it in inches.

We are stubborn on vision and flexible on details.

The more you create, the more powerful you become. The more you consume, the more powerful others become.

There is a difference between moving fast and rushing. You can move fast and be thoughtful. When you rush, you sacrifice thoughtfulness. Conversely, when you are thoughtful but not moving fast, you are overthinking it. Procrastination in disguise. Don't rush, but don't wait.

There comes a time in every life when the past recedes and the future opens. It’s that moment when you turn to face the unknown. Some will turn back to what they already know. Some will walk straight ahead into uncertainty. I can’t tell you which one is right. But I can tell you which one is more fun.

All history is the study of what's changed, but it's often used as a guide to the future.

Things that have never happened before happen all the time.

Some lessons have to be experienced before they can be understood.

You should make money because you have enabled a unique form of flourishing, and you get to share in the benefits of that flourishing.

If investing is entertaining, if you’re having fun, you’re probably not making any money. Good investing is boring.

I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

For me, success is not a public thing. It's a private thing. It's when you have fewer and fewer regrets.

Teach everything you know.

It’s when you’re not humble that you end up doing things that will make you humble.

When a person can't find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure.

Our greatest freedom is the freedom to choose our attitude.

Remember, today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday.

You only get your first real market price when the lockup expires.

One essential characteristic of modern life is that we all depend on systems… and among our most profound difficulties is making them work.

Emerging markets rarely emerge.

There are lots of ways to make money, but it is really important to find one that fits well with the way that you are built emotionally. You have to discover it as early as you can.

The stock market is a device for transferring money from the impatient to the patient.

A genius is the one most like himself.

Fund consultants like to require style boxes such as “long-short,” “macro,” “international equities.” At Berkshire our only style box is “smart.”

Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.

It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.

The reading of good books is like a conversation with the best men of past centuries.

When an investor focuses on short-term investments, he or she is observing the variability of the portfolio, not the returns.

Let others praise ancient times; I am glad I was born in these.

Compete against yourself. Root for everyone else.

Barriers to entry on the internet are low, but barriers to scale are high.

Where some people measure progress in answers-right per test or tests-passed per year, we are more interested in "Sistine-Chapel-Ceilings per Lifetime.”

I tell young people all the time, you have to find something you love. If you don’t love it, find something else. Because you can’t win a Nobel prize doing something you hate.

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.

What the wise do in the beginning, fools do in the end.

Fortune favors the bold.

Being able to help others is the greatest blessing that money has given me.

I'm the richest guy in the world because I'm content with what I have.

If your life is more important than your principles, you sacrifice your principles. If your principles are more important than your life, you sacrifice your life.

So remember this principle when something threatens to cause you pain: the thing itself was no misfortune at all; to endure it and prevail is great good fortune.

Nothing is easier than self-deceit. For what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true.

The destruction of contemplation is the existential threat to our humanity.

Our performance doesn't come from what we buy or sell. It comes from what we hold. So the main activity is holding, not buying or selling.

Many funds start with lots of cake as their goal. It's not the cake that gratifies us. What we found gratifying was the process of solving the investment problem, learning along the way and doing as good a job as we knew how—they are all internal personal goals. The cake was then a (happy) byproduct.

You want to be structured to participate in the march of mankind, but to survive the dips along the way.

Change is the norm. Complacency is the enemy.

The real trouble with this world of ours is not that it is an unreasonable world, or even that it is a reasonable one. The commonest kind of trouble is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite. Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is: its excactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wildness lies in wait.

It's frightening to think that you might not know something, but more frightening to think that, by and large, the world is run by people who have faith that they know exactly what's going on.

We have two classes of forecasters: those who don't know — and those who don't know they don't know.

Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.

Be not afraid of greatness. Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon them.

Our job is not to see the future, it’s to see the present very clearly.

When you start looking at a problem and it seems really simple, you don’t really understand the complexity of the problem. Then you get into the problem, and you see that it’s really complicated, and you come up with all these convoluted solutions. That’s sort of the middle, and that’s where most people stop. But the really great person will keep on going and find the key, the underlying principle of the problem — and come up with an elegant, really beautiful solution that works.

The harder I work the luckier I get.

Build equity in audiences.

I’m not qualified to have an opinion on a subject unless I can state the arguments against my position better than the people do who are supporting it. I think that only when I reach that stage am I entitled to speak.

I took Economics just so I could read the paper intelligently. I went to get a PhD in Economics and I went there and I said: “These people are crazy. They’re trying to shove the economy into a math formula. It doesn’t make any sense.”

Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.

Put all your eggs in one basket and watch the basket carefully.

The future should be viewed not as a fixed outcome that’s destined to happen and capable of being predicted, but as a range of possibilities and, hopefully on the basis of insight into their respective likelihoods, as a probability distribution.

Tell me what you pay attention to and I will tell you who you are.

Know what you own, and know why you own it.

Our ideas are so simple that people keep asking us for mysteries when all we have are the most elementary ideas.

When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.

Creative work in any established system of thought takes place at the boundaries of the system, where its powers of explanation are least developed and its vulnerability to outside attack is most marked.

You must spend all of your time understanding, then doing is easy.

The single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas.

Show me the incentives and I will show you the outcome.

As we know more of life, so Shakespeare comments upon what we know.

If you were ready for it, it wouldn't be growth.

Never argue with stupid people. They will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience.

The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those who speak it.

Uncertainty is an uncomfortable position. But certainty is an absurd one.

Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.

Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.

You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.

The best index to a person's character is (a) how he treats people who can't do him any good, and (b) how he treats people who can't fight back.

Test ideas by experiment and observation. Build on those ideas that pass the test. Reject the ones that fail. Follow the evidence wherever it leads. And question everything, including authority. Do these things and the cosmos is yours.

The distinction between an investment practice and investment business: A business gives to the customer what they want. The manager creates a product to fill a need. A practice, like a medical or law practice, is there to give a client what they need.

At critical moments in time, you can raise the aspirations of other people significantly, especially when they are relatively young, simply by suggesting they do something better or more ambitious than what they might have in mind. It costs you relatively little to do this, but the benefit to them, and to the broader world, may be enormous. This is in fact one of the most valuable things you can do with your time and with your life.

People generally see what they look for, and hear what they listen for.

A human [is] a lifelong child that desires the toy someone else has just picked up.

The single greatest edge an investor can have is a long-term orientation.

It is essential to the well-being of a society that the whole should be less mad than the parts.

The best arguments in the world won't change a person's mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.

There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.

What the smartest people do on the weekend is what everyone else will do during the week in ten years.

If you're not a little confused by what's going on you don't understand it.

I have been a great actor for so long that I no longer know what I truly think on any subject.

You can’t learn anything when you’re trying to look like the smartest person in the room.

Chasing excellence beats chasing the scoreboard.

I don't know what I think until I write it down.

Be slow of tongue and quick of eye.

Just be in the tails of distributions. That’s always my mindset.

The stock market is filled with individuals who know the price of everything, but the value of nothing.

The single greatest edge an investor can have is a long-term orientation.

If you aren't going all the way, why go at all?

Time is the friend of the wonderful company, the enemy of the mediocre.

The upside of painful knowledge is so much greater than the downside of blissful ignorance.

We must all suffer one of two things: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret or disappointment.

People by and large become what they think of themselves.

Given a 10% chance of a 100 times payoff, you should take that bet every time.

Forget about your competitors. Just focus on your customers.

(On using margin) If you're smart you don't need it and if you're dumb you shouldn't be using it.

Imagination is the highest form of research.

We've got no money, so we've got to think.

An alleged scientific discovery has no merit unless it can be explained to a barmaid.

All science is either physics or stamp collecting.

Scientists are not dependent on the ideas of a single man, but on the combined wisdom of thousands of men, all thinking of the same problem, and each doing his little bit to add to the great structure of knowledge which is gradually being erected.

The way to build long-term returns is through preservation of capital and home runs.

Never mistake motion for action.

Be brutally honest about the short term and optimistic and confident about the long term.

Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

When your work speaks for itself, don’t interrupt.

The iron rule of nature is: you get what you reward for. If you want ants to come, you put sugar on the floor.

You could beat a grandmaster at chess if you could move twice every time he moved once.

Email is where keystrokes go to die. (So use high-leverage keystrokes.)

Make everyone's best ideas your baseline.

Every thought you have is downstream from the information you choose to consume.

Writing is the antidote to confusion.

Information is the resolution of uncertainty.

Use practice as the bar for truth.

Join tribes where your desired behavior is the normal behavior.

Changing your habits is about changing your identity.

The cost of your good habits is in the present; the cost of your bad habits is in the future.

Regret for things we did is tempered by time. But regret for things we did not do is inconsolable.

Bad companies are destroyed by crisis, good companies survive them, great companies are improved by them.

The most powerful force that could be potentially harnessed is dogged incremental constant progress over a very long time frame. This is above genius. It’s absolutely above genius because you can understand it.

The trick is not to learn to trust your gut feelings, but rather to discipline yourself to ignore them.

Frugal is not cheap.

Stability is destabilizing.

Unfashionable ideas are disproportionately likely to lead somewhere interesting. The best place to find undiscovered ideas is where no one else is looking.

Investing is the only business I know that when things go on sale, people run out of the store.

The role of the designer is that of a very good, thoughtful host, anticipating the needs of his guests.

There is no greater harm than that of time wasted.

A superior business model is the ultimate hedge.

The goal of investment is to find situations where it is safe not to diversify.

If you value your time, right now is the richest you’ll ever be.

One of the things we have learnt over the last few years is that our most profitable insights have come from recognizing the deep reality of some businesses, not from being more contrarian than everyone else.

Keep inventing, and don't despair when at first the idea looks crazy. Remember to wander. Let curiosity be your compass. It remains Day 1.

We are dominated by the relatively small number of persons who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.

Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.

The stock market is a giant distraction to the business of investing.

The intelligent investor is a realist who sells to optimists and buys from pessimists.

Any fool can know. The point is to understand.

Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous intellect.

As I grow older, I pay less attention to what people say. I just watch what they do.

Learning is defined as a change in behavior. You haven't learned a thing until you can take action and use it.

Be curious. Read widely. Try new things. I think a lot of what people call intelligence boils down to curiosity.

The more transformative your idea is, the more patience you’ll need to make it happen.

The enemy of a good plan is the dream of a perfect plan.

Don't confuse IQ with QE.

It's not whether you're right or wrong that's important, but how much money you make when you're right and how much you lose when you're wrong.

I'll only have a few good insights over my lifetime, so I have to maximize the few I have.

Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.

The first rule of compounding is to never interrupt it uncecessarily.

You don’t have to be brilliant, only a little bit wiser than the other guys, on average, for a long time.

A short focus is not conducive to long profits.

I've not conducted my life in the service of smallness.

Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.

Discipline is a practice, not a thought.

Success is never final. Failure is never fatal. It is courage that counts.

It is better to be approximately right than precisely wrong.

Prior to capitalism, the way people amassed great wealth was by looting, plundering and enslaving their fellow man. Capitalism made it possible to become wealthy by serving your fellow man.

What really matters is how fast you learn, not where you start.

Add value before you ask for value.

The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything.

When you are in a hurry you are in danger.

Sit down and ask yourself: how can I turn my values into time?

Real history is the story of lots of things happening at the same time.

When you're in a gold rush, it's better to be the one selling the shovels.

The heart of adventure is mystery.

No great person, when called upon for great leadership, has thought themselves fully ready.

The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits.

You can't borrow someone else's conviction.

Performance is an output of people and process.

Easy choices, hard life. Hard choices, easy life.

If everyone is thinking alike, then no one is thinking.

Pursue what is meaningful, not what is expedient.

The pessimist complains about the wind. The optimist expects it to change. The realist adjusts the sails.

To those who dream there is no such place as far away.

Never give up on something without first understanding it.

All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

Villainy wears many masks, none so dangerous as the mask of virtue.

In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few.

You can tell the greatness of a man by what makes him angry.

Things may come to those who wait, but only the things left by those who hustle.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.

There are many victories worse than defeat.

The evolution of sin: sin has evolved from being theologically against God, to a crime against our fellow man, to psychologically against oneself.

The real competition out there isn't for clients, it's for people. And we look to hire people who are, first, very smart; second, insecure and thus driven by their insecurity; and third, competitive. Put together 3,000 of these egocentric, task-oriented, achievement-oriented people, and it produces an atmosphere of something less than humility. Yes, it's elitist. But don't you think there has to be room somewhere in this politically correct world for something like this?

To my mind, the idea that doing dishes is unpleasant can occur only when you aren't doing them. Once you are standing in front of the sink with your sleeves rolled up and your hands in the warm water, it is really quite pleasant. I enjoy taking my time with each dish, being fully aware of the dish, the water, and each movement of my hands. I know that if I hurry in order to eat dessert sooner, the time of washing dishes will be unpleasant and not worth living. That would be a pity, for each minute, each second of life is a miracle! If I am incapable of washing dishes joyfully, if I want to finish them quickly so I can go and have dessert, I will be equally incapable of enjoying my dessert. With the fork in my hand, I will be thinking about what to do next, and the texture and the flavor of the dessert, together with the pleasure of eating it, will be lost. I will always be dragged into the future, never able to live in the present moment. Each thought, each action in the sunlight of awareness becomes sacred. In this light, no boundary exists between the sacred and the profane. I must confess it takes me a bit longer to do the dishes, but I live fully in every moment, and I am happy. Washing the dishes is at the same time a means and an end - that is, not only do we do the dishes in order to have clean dishes, we also do the dishes just to do the dishes, to live fully in each moment while washing them.

If you place enough of those bets, and if you place them early enough, none of them are ever betting the company. By the time you are betting the company, it means you haven’t invented for too long.

There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.

Our lives improve only when we take chances—and the first and most difficult risk we can take is to be honest with ourselves.

If everything seems under control you're just not going fast enough.

Our five senses are incomplete without a sixth...a sense of humor.

The only thing necessary for evil to exist in the world is for those who are good to do nothing about it.

When you can’t make sense, make a distinction.

If it ain’t broke, fix it until it is.

The difference between involvement and commitment is like an eggs-and-ham breakfast: the chicken was involved - the pig was committed.

Life shouldn't be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather, to skid in broadside, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly shouting, Wow! What a ride! Thank you, Lord!

Life isn't about how to survive the storm, but how to dance in the rain.

If there is a golf course in heaven, this is it.  (Said of Augusta National Golf Course.)

Tell me who admires you and loves you, and I will tell you who you are.

Friendship is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love.

Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.

To recognize the significant in the factual is wisdom.

To understand reality is not the same as to know about outward events. It is to perceive the essential nature of things. The best-informed man is not necessarily the wisest. Indeed there is a danger that precisely in the multiplicity of his knowledge he will lose sight of what is essential. But on the other hand, knowledge of an apparently trivial detail quite often makes it possible to see into the depth of things. And so the wise man will seek to acquire the best possible knowledge about events, but always without becoming dependent upon this knowledge. To recognize the significant in the factual is wisdom.

I still find each day too short for all the thoughts I want to think, all the walks I want to take, all the books I want to read, and all the friends I want to see.

They never fail who die in great cause.

We must be willing to let go of the life we’ve imagined, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.

In nocturne veritas.

I grow and mature, but never as fast as I aspire.

He speaks as though he is conquering.

If you have less talent than others, but are intentional with your time, you can accomplish anything.

I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.

I believe in America because we have great dreams - and because we have the opportunity to make those dreams come true.

Faith without works is like a song you can’t sing, it’s about as useless as a screen door on a submarine.

If you think you can, or you think you can't, you're right.

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it’s time to pause and reflect.

If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.

Democracy is the worst form of government, next to everything else.

I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.

It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not to deserve them.

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do.  So throw off the bowlines.  Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails.  Explore, dream, discover.

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.

Men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

Be it life or death, we crave only reality.

Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.

Distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.

The truth is rarely pure and never simple.

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing worth knowing can be taught.

Defeat never comes to any man until he admits it.

Not all those who wonder are lost.

The challenge to executives is to coordinate efforts of all categories of workers.

That which you cannot live without you are a slave to.

The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.

It is very important for the United States to be perceived as having not power, but overwhelming power, and not predictable in the way it would use it. That is why George Bush does a good job; nobody in the world knows quite what he will do, and they are not eager to test that.

Make systematic improvement a priority.

Humankind cannot stand very much reality.

There are several quintessential moments in a man’s life…getting married, becoming a father, and having the right girl smile at you.

Sure I am of this, that you have only to endure to conquer.

When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.

People demand freedom of speech to make up for the freedom of thought which they avoid.

You must be the change you wish to see in the world.

When you do the common things in life in an uncommon way you will command the attention of the world. 

I didn’t break any rules, but rules have been made because of me.  

We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.

Every day is like a work of art.

We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in the slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by a holiday at the sea.  We are far too easily pleased. 

Reason is our soul's left hand, Faith her right.

Love is the wisdom of the fool and the folly of the wise.

The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.

There are only two ways to live life: One as though nothing is a miracle, the other as though everything is a miracle.

In saving the Union, I have destroyed the republic. Before me I have the Confederacy which I loath. But behind me I have the bankers which I fear.  

Every soul is unwilling to be deprived of truth.

You'd far rather argue long and hard with young and vigorous minds than hear them acquiesce because you are who you are.

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.

Patriotism is easy to understand in America.  It means looking out for yourself by looking out for your country.

Great spirits have often encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.

I don't know anything about music. In my line you don't have to.

It’s kind of fun to do the impossible.

All men who have achieved great things have been great dreamers.

Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing.

While we live, let us live.

I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.

As you walk down the fairway of life you must smell the roses, for you only get to play one round.

You have enemies?  Good.  That means you've stood up for something sometime in your life.

I am not young enough to know everything.

Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the whole universe thing.

How many times does your heart meet the most beautiful girl in the world?

The only things that evolve by themselves in an organization are disorder, friction, and malperformance.

The executive and the knowledge worker have only one tool: information.

If you knew how much work went into it, you wouldn’t call it genius.

Tact is the knack of making a point without making an enemy.

I like to listen.  I have learned a great deal from listening carefully.  Most people never listen.

I'd rather entertain people and hope that people learn, than teach and hope that people are entertained.

The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.

The power of accurate observation is frequently called cynicism by those who don't have it.

Dead friends aren’t good friends.

Laughter is America's most important export.

Victory goes to the player who makes the next-to-last mistake.

Management always deal with the nature of Man, and with Good and Evil.

There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.

The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.

Copy from one, it's plagiarism; copy from two, it's research.

In wine there is wisdom, in beer there is freedom, in water there is bacteria.

The right answer to the wrong problem is very difficult to fix.

By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.

A little nonsense now and then is cherished by the wisest man.

The study of philosophy is a study of ideas and their consequences.  It not only helps one in life, but it also helps one to define what life is and to live well.  Ideas are meaningful, and the words that convey them have consequences.

Of all mens' miseries the bitterest is this: to know so much and have control over nothing.

Danger - if you meet it promptly and without flinching - you will reduce the danger by half.  Never run away from anything.  Never! 

We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.

However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.

Decision makers need to factor into their present decisions the future that has already happened.

I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.  (Said in 1943.)

Therefore I advise no one to enter any religious order or the priesthood, indeed, I advise everyone against it—unless he is forearmed with this knowledge and understands that the works of monks and priests, however holy and arduous they may be, do not differ one whit in the sight of God from the works of the rustic laborer in the field or the woman going about her household tasks, but that all works are measured before God by faith alone.

Now nowm, my good man, this is no time for making enemies.  (Said on his deathbed in response to a priest asking him to renounce Satan.)

An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered; an adventure is an inconvenience rightly considered.

Success is never final. Failure is never fatal. It is courage that counts.

The happiest people I have known have been those who gave themselves no concern about their own souls, but did their uttermost to mitigate the miseries of others.

Nothing in the world is so powerful as an idea whose time has come.

In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.

The journey is the reward.

A man is about as big as the things that make him angry.

Another adventure.

Rudeness is the weak man’s imitation of strength.

No organization can do better than the people it has.

Golf is deceptively simple and endlessly complicated; it satisfies the soul and frustrates the intellect.  It is at the same time rewarding and maddening.  It is without a doubt the greatest game mankind has ever invented.

Quit now, you'll never make it. If you disregard this advice, you'll be halfway there.

Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.

History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.

Blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving in word evidence of the fact.

Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.

A man is not finished when he’s defeated; he’s finished when he quits.

Knowledge workers must take responsibility for their own development and placement.

You see things and you say "Why?" But I dream things that never were; and I say "Why not?"

Whatever you are, be a good one.

A release can become a character.

I like a man who grins when he fights.

I’m all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools.  Let’s start with typewriters.

This above all: To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.

Look at people for who they are, not what they are not.

Every man's memory is his private literature.

The road to success is always under construction.

He who has a why to live, can bear with almost any how.

A man's feet must be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.

Going in one more round when you don't think you can - that's what makes all the difference in your life.

After I'm dead I'd rather have people ask why I have no monument than why I have one.

It is action and not merely sentiment that forms the heart and prepares the mind for the acquisition of moral and spiritual truth.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Successful entrepreneurs do not wait until the the Muse kisses them and gives them a bright idea; they go to work.

Most people don’t think about you half as much as you may think they do.

The drunken man’s words are the sober man’s thoughts.

The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

Trifles make perfection, and perfection is no trifle.

I love Mickey Mouse more than any woman I have ever known.

In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can't build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery and death.

Start with what is right rather than what is acceptable.

I hope that I may always desire more than I can accomplish.

I can't let them go. Who would pay for the government?

We have art to save ourselves from the truth.

The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.

There comes a moment in life when silence becomes a betrayal of the principles in which one believes.

I'll moider da bum.  (Said when the famous boxer was asked what he thought about Shakespeare.)

The problem is not with technology. It is with mentality.

Speak what you feel, not what you ought to say.

By far the most common mistake is to treat a generic situation as if it were a series of unique events.

In an ecology, the whole has to be seen and understood and the parts exist only in contemplation of the whole.

To live will be an awfully big adventure.  (Peter Pan's character in the movie Hook.)

Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.

The first step to becoming a secure person is admitting that you are insecure.

Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.

I like to see a man proud of the place in which he lives.  I like to see a man live so that his place will be proud of him.

It can be said that there are no under-developed countries. There are only under-managed ones.

Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.

Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names.

There are people in the world so hungry that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.

Never give in, never give in, never; never; never; never - in nothing, great or small, large or petty - never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense.

The most rewarding things you do in life are often the ones that look like they cannot be done.

Success is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm.

The nice thing about being a celebrity is that if you bore people they think it's their fault.

The world is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who think.

I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.

I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.

All our dreams can come true if we have enough courage to pursue them.

I've not failed.  I've just found 10,000 ways that don't work.

Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.

The best thing you can do is simply be aware of yourself...the manner in which you do things now will most likely be how you will do things the rest of your life.

Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.

I believe that the moment is near when by a procedure of active paranoiac thought it will be possible to systematize confusion and contribute to the total discrediting of the world of reality.

People are just as happy as they make up their minds to be.

If we did the things we are capable of we would astound ourselves.

The fool wonders.  The wise man asks.

Imagination is more important than knowledge.

The unexamined life is not worth living.

In cost control an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.