Charlie Munger Quotes

Envy is a really stupid sin because it’s the only one you could never possibly have any fun at. There’s a lot of pain and no fun. Why would you want to get on that trolley?

Warren talks about these discounted cash flows. I’ve never seen him do one.

If something is too hard, we move on to something else. What could be simpler than that?

not drifting into extreme ideology is very, very important in life. If you want to end up wise, heavy ideology is very likely to prevent that outcome.

I constantly see people rise in life who are not the smartest, sometimes not even the most diligent, but they are learning machines. They go to bed every night a little wiser than they were when they got up and boy does that help, particularly when you have a long run ahead of you.

which helps the objective person end up like the only player without a blindfold in a game of pin the tail on the donkey.

And deprival-superreaction syndrome also comes in: You’re going to lose the whole thing if you don’t put in a little more. People go broke that way because they can’t stop, rethink, and say, “I can afford to write this one off and live to fight again. I don’t have to pursue this thing as an obsession, in a way that will break me.

Wesco continues to try more to profit from always remembering the obvious than from grasping the esoteric. … It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent. There must be some wisdom in the folk saying, `It’s the strong swimmers who drown.

The third helpful notion is that it is not enough to think problems through forward. You must also think in reverse, much like the rustic who wanted to know where he was going to die so that he’d never go there. Indeed, many problems can’t be solved forward. And that is why the great algebraist Carl Jacobi so often said, “Invert, always invert,” and why the Pythagoreans51 thought in reverse to prove that the square root of two was an irrational number.

First (prescription for misery), be unreliable. Do not faithfully do what you have engaged to do. If you will only master this one habit, you will more that counterbalance the combined effect of all your virtues, howsoever great. If you like being distrusted and excluded from the best human contribution and company, this prescription is for you. Master this one habit, and you will always play the role of the hare in the fable, except that instead of being outrun by the one fine turtle, you will be outrun by hordes and hordes of mediocre turtles and even some mediocre turtles on crutches.

Acquire worldly wisdom and adjust your behavior accordingly. If your new behavior gives you a little temporary unpopularity with your peer group... then to hell with them.

... I regard it as a cinch that a great nation will in due time be Rome. ... Where is Rome? Where is Britain in its heyday? They all pass and so our turn is bound to come some day.

In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a board subject matter area) who didn't read all the time - none, zero. You'd be amazed how much Warren reads - and at how much I read. My children laugh at me. They think I'm a book with a couple of legs sticking out.

The fourth helpful notion is that the best and most practical wisdom is elementary academic wisdom. But there is one extremely important qualification: You must think in a multidisciplinary manner. You must routinely use all the easy-to-learn concepts from the freshman course in every basic subject.

The great algorithm to remember in dealing with this tendency is simple: an idea or a fact is not worth more merely because it’s easily available to you.