Charlie Munger Quotes

It's not supposed to be easy. Anyone who finds it easy is stupid.

If anything, I now believe even more strongly that 1) reliability is essential for progress in life and 2) while quantum mechanics is unlearnable for a vast majority, reliability can be learned to great advantage by almost anyone.

For example, buy Walmart when Sam Walton first goes public and so forth. A lot of people try to do just that. And it’s a very beguiling idea. If I were a young man, I might actually go into it. But it doesn’t work for Berkshire Hathaway anymore because we’ve got too much money. We can’t find anything that fits our size parameter that way. Besides, we’re set in our ways. But I regard finding them small as a perfectly intelligent approach for somebody to try with discipline. It’s just not something that I’ve done.

You climb as hard as you can by just advancing one inch at a time. That's the secret of life.

Which models are the most reliable? Well, obviously, the models that come from hard science and engineering are the most reliable models on this earth. And engineering quality control — at least the guts of it that matters to you and me and people who are not professional engineers — is very much based on the elementary mathematics of Fermat and Pascal: It costs so much, and you get so much less likelihood of it breaking if you spend this much. It’s all elementary high school mathematics.

The first helpful notion is that it is usually best to simplify problems by deciding big no-brainer questions first. The second helpful notion mimics Galileo’s50 conclusion that scientific reality is often revealed only by math as if math was the language of God.

When Warren lectures at business schools, he says, “I could improve your ultimate financial welfare by giving you a ticket with only 20 slots in it so that you had 20 punches, representing all the investments that you got to make in a lifetime. And once you’d punched through the card, you couldn’t make any more investments at all.” He says, “Under those rules, you’d really think carefully about what you did, and you’d be forced to load up on what you’d really thought about. So you’d do so much better.

This sort of tragedy is caused by letting the slop run. You must stop slop early. It’s very hard to stop slop and moral failure if you let it run for a while.

You fix what can be fixed, and what can't be fixed you endure.

Face your big troubles, don’t sweep them under the rug.

First, be unreliable. Do not faithfully do what you have engaged to do. If you will only master this one habit, you will more than counterbalance the combined effect of all your virtues, howsoever great.

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.

All I want to know is where I'm going to die so I'll never go there.

If, in your thinking, you rely entirely on others — often through purchase of professional advice — whenever outside a small territory of your own, you will suffer much calamity.

How to find a good spouse?
-the best single way is to deserve a good spouse.