Morgan Housel Quotes

The highest form of wealth is the ability to wake up every morning and say, “I can do whatever I want today.

most great things in life — from love to careers to investing — gain their value from two things: patience and scarcity. Patience to let something grow, and scarcity to admire what it grows into.

At some point you have to choose between being happy or being “right.

The challenge for us is that no amount of studying or open-mindedness can genuinely recreate the power of fear and uncertainty. I can read about what it was like to lose everything during the Great Depression. But I don’t have the emotional scars of those who actually experienced it. And the person who lived through it can’t fathom why someone like me could come across as complacent about things like owning stocks. We see the world through a different lens.

Same in investing. Cash is an inefficient drag during bull markets and as valuable as oxygen during bear markets

Nassim Taleb put it this way: “Having an ‘edge’ and surviving are two different things: the first requires the second. You need to avoid ruin. At all costs.

Mark Twain once said he knew he was a successful author when Kaiser Wilhelm II said he’d read every Twain book, and later that day a porter at his hotel said the same. “Great books are wine,” Twain said, “but my books are water. But everybody drinks water.” He found the universal emotions that influence everyone, regardless of who they were or where they were from, and got them to nod their heads in the same direction. It’s nearly magic. Guiding people’s attention to a single point is one of the most powerful life skills.

Using your money to buy time and options has a lifestyle benefit few luxury goods can compete with.

Here’s the most important part of this story: The Russell 3000 has increased more than 73-fold since 1980. That is a spectacular return. That is success. Forty percent of the companies in the index were effectively failures. But the 7% of components that performed extremely well were more than enough to offset the duds.

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

I’ve been banging away at this thing for 30 years. I think the simple math is, some projects work and some don’t. There’s no reason to belabor either one. Just get on to the next.

I visualized my grief if the stock market went way up and I wasn’t in it — or if it went way down and I was completely in it. My intention was to minimize my future regret. So I split my contributions 50/50 between bonds and equities.

At a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island, Kurt Vonnegut informs his pal, Joseph Heller, that their host, a hedge fund manager, had made more money in a single day than Heller had earned from his wildly popular novel Catch-22 over its whole history. Heller responds, “Yes, but I have something he will never have … enough.” Enough. I was stunned by the simple eloquence of that word — stunned for two reasons: first, because I have been given so much in my own life and, second, because Joseph Heller couldn’t have been more accurate. For a critical element of our society, including many of the wealthiest and most powerful among us, there seems to be no limit today on what enough entails.

People don’t remember books; they remember sentences.

In theory people should make investment decisions based on their goals and the characteristics of the investment options available to them at the time. But that’s not what people do.