Charlie Munger Quotes

The safest way to get what you want is to deserve what you want.

All the equity investors, in total, will surely bear a performance disadvantage per annum equal to the total croupiers’ costs they have jointly elected to bear. This is an inescapable fact of life. And it is also inescapable that exactly half of the investors will get a result below the median result after the croupiers’ take, which median result may well be somewhere between unexciting and lousy.

Own your work and compound credibility.

I want to think about things where I have an advantage over others. I don't want to play a game where people have an advantage over me. I don't play in a game where other people are wise and I am stupid. I look for a game where I am wise, and they are stupid. And believe me, it works better. God bless our stupid competitors. They make us rich.

You don't have to pee on an electric fence to learn not to do it

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 that help, particularly when you have a long run ahead of you.

Good ideas are rare — when the odds are greatly in your favor, bet (allocate) heavily.

Resist the craving for false precision, false certainties, etc.

Take a simple idea and take it seriously.

Avoid unnecessary transactional taxes and frictional costs; never take action for its own sake.

Whenever you think that some situation or some person is ruining your life, it's actually you who are ruining your life. It's such a simple idea. Feeling like a victim is a perfectly disastrous way to go through life. If you just take the attitude that however bad it is in any way, it's always your fault and you just fix it as best you can—the so-called 'iron prescription'—I think that really works.

It's amazing how intelligent it is just to spend some time sitting. A lot of people are way too active.

Remember that just because other people agree or disagree with you doesn’t make you right or wrong — the only thing that matters is the correctness of your analysis and judgment.

The quotes, talks, and speeches presented here are rooted in the old-fashioned Midwestern values for which Charlie has become known: lifelong learning, intellectual curiosity, sobriety, avoidance of envy and resentment, reliability, learning from the mistakes of others, perseverance, objectivity, willingness to test one’s own beliefs, and many more. But his advice comes not in the form of stentorian admonishments; instead, Charlie uses humor, inversions (following the directive of the great algebraist [Carl] Jacobi to “invert, always invert”), and paradox to provide sage counsel about life’s toughest challenges.

The idea that life is a series of adversities and each one is an opportunity to behave well instead of badly is a very, very good idea.