Top 160 Benjamin Graham Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “There is something paradoxical in the fact that by establishing an export market we subject our entire domestic production to the vagaries of that market.”

— Benjamin Graham

102. “You will be much more in control, if you realize how much you are not in control.”

— Benjamin Graham

103. “An investment operation is one which, upon thorough analysis promises safety of principal and an adequate return. Operations not meeting these requirements are speculative.”

— Benjamin Graham

104. “Intelligent investment is more a matter of mental approach than it is of technique. A sound mental approach toward stock fluctuations is the touchstone of all successful investment under present-day conditions.”

— Benjamin Graham

105. “The Reservoir system will function not only as an equalizer of business conditions, but also as a national store to meet further emergencies, such as war and drought, and-most important of all-as the concrete means of developing a steadily higher living standard for all.”

— Benjamin Graham

106. “Before you place your financial future in the hands of an adviser, it’s imperative that you find someone who not only makes you comfortable but whose honesty is beyond reproach.”

— Benjamin Graham

107. “The world has not learned the technique of balanced expansion without the resultant commercial and financial congestion.”

— Benjamin Graham

108. “No matter how careful you are, the one risk no investor can ever eliminate is the risk of being wrong. Only by insisting on what Graham called the “margin of safety” – never overpaying, no matter how exciting an investment seems to be – can you minimize your odds of error.”

— Benjamin Graham

109. “All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.”

— Benjamin Graham

110. “The underlying principles of sound investment should not alter from decade to decade, but the application of these principles must be adapted to significant changes in the financial mechanisms and climate.”

— Benjamin Graham

111. “Unusually rapid growth cannot keep up forever; when a company has already registered a brilliant expansion, its very increase in size makes a repetition of its achievement more difficult.”

— Benjamin Graham

112. “Undervaluations caused by neglect or prejudice may persist for an inconveniently long time, and the same applies to inflated prices caused by over-enthusiasm or artificial stimulants.”

— Benjamin Graham

113. “An investor calculates what a stock is worth, based on the value of its businesses.”

— Benjamin Graham

114. “The purchase of a bargain issue presupposes that the market’s current appraisal is wrong, or at least that the buyer’s idea of value is more likely to be right than the market’s. In this process the investor sets his judgement against that of the market. To some this may seem arrogant or foolhardy.”

— Benjamin Graham

115. “The Reservoir plan is an engineering mechanism applied to the field of economics, and in its essence it has nothing to do with democracy or any other political philosophy.”

— Benjamin Graham

116. “It is worth pointing out that assuredly not more than one person out of a hundred who stayed in the market after after 1925 emerged from it with a net profit and that the speculative losses taken were appalling.”

— Benjamin Graham

117. “In nine companies out of ten the factor of fluctuation has been a more dominant and important consideration in the matter of investment than has the factor of long-term growth or decline.”

— Benjamin Graham

118. “The people of the United States will not tolerate another deep depression that arises not from any lack of natural resources, productive capacity or man and brain power, but solely from imperfections in the functioning of the system of finance capitalism.”

— Benjamin Graham

119. “Knowledge is only one ingredient on arriving at a stock’s proper price. The other ingredient, fully as important as information, is sound judgment.”

— Benjamin Graham

120. “Even the most conservative must realize that the recent transformation of surplus from an individual to a national disaster implies a scathing indictment of our capitalist system as it has now developed.”

— Benjamin Graham

121. “Wall Street has a few prudent principles; the trouble is that they are always forgotten when they are most needed.”

— Benjamin Graham

122. “Observation over many years has taught us that the chief losses to investors come from the purchase of low-quality securities at times of good business conditions. The purchasers view the good current earnings as equivalent to ‘earning power’ and assume that prosperity is equivalent to safety.”

— Benjamin Graham

123. “You’ve got to be careful if you don’t know where you’re going, ’cause you might not get there. – Yogi Berra.”

— Benjamin Graham

124. “I am more and more impressed with the possibilities of history’s repeating itself on many different counts. You don’t get very far in Wall Street with the simple, convenient conclusion that a given level of prices is not too high.”

— Benjamin Graham

125. “Traditionally the investor has been the man with patience and the courage of his convictions who would buy when the harried or disheartened speculator was selling.”

— Benjamin Graham

126. “Since the profits that companies can earn are finite, the price that investors should be willing to pay for stocks must also be finite.”

— Benjamin Graham

127. “The genuine investor in common stocks does not need a great equipment of brain and knowledge, but he does need some unusual qualities of character.”

— Benjamin Graham

128. “Astute observers of corporate balance sheets are often the first to see business deterioration.”

— Benjamin Graham

129. “Successful investment may become substantially a matter of techniques and criteria that are learnable, rather than the product of unique and incommunicable mental powers.”

— Benjamin Graham

130. “When somebody asserts that a stock has an earning power of so much, I am sure that the person who hears him doesn’t know what he means, and there is a good chance that the man who uses it doesn’t know what it means.”

— Benjamin Graham

131. “People who invest make money for themselves; people who speculate make money for their brokers. And that, in turn, is why Wall Street perennially downplays the durable virtues of investing and hypes the gaudy appeal of speculation.”

— Benjamin Graham

132. “The beauty of periodic rebalancing is that it forces you to base your investing decisions on a simple, objective standard.”

— Benjamin Graham

133. “The best way to measure your investing success is not by whether you’re beating the market but by whether you’ve put in place a financial plan and a behavioral discipline that are likely to get you where you want to go. In the end, what matters isn’t crossing the finish line before anybody else but just making sure that you do cross it.8.”

— Benjamin Graham

134. “Price fluctuations have only one significant meaning for the true investor. They provide him with an opportunity to buy wisely when prices fall sharply and to sell wisely when they advance a great deal.”

— Benjamin Graham

135. “The most dangerous untruths are truths slightly distorted. – G. C. Lichtenberg.”

— Benjamin Graham

136. “As in roulette, same is true of the stock trader, who will find that the expense of trading weights the dice heavily against him.”

— Benjamin Graham

137. “There is a close logical connection between the concept of a safety margin and the principle of diversification.”

— Benjamin Graham

138. “While a trend shown in the past is a fact, a “future trend” is only an assumption.”

— Benjamin Graham

139. “We define a bargain issue as one which, on the basis of facts established by analysis, appears to be worth considerably more that it is selling for.”

— Benjamin Graham

140. “The investor should be aware that even though safety of its principal and interest may be unquestioned, a long term bond could vary widely in market price in response to changes in interest rates.”

— Benjamin Graham

141. “The thing that I have been emphasizing in my own work for the last few years has been the group approach. To try to buy groups of stocks that meet some simple criterion for being undervalued-regardless of the industry and with very little attention to the individual company.”

— Benjamin Graham

142. “The qualitative factors upon which most stress is laid are the nature of the business and the character of the management. These elements are exceedingly important, but they are also exceedingly difficult to deal with intelligently.”

— Benjamin Graham

143. “We urge the beginner in security buying not to waste his efforts and his money in trying to beat the market. Let him study security values and initially test out his judgment on price versus value with the smallest possible sums.”

— Benjamin Graham

144. “It is a fact worth pondering that four centuries ago the evil of “an abundance or surplus” arose from its being kept off the market, while today the evil of surplus lies in its being thrown upon the market.”

— Benjamin Graham

145. “Speculative stock movements are carried too far in both directions, frequently in the general market and at all times in at least some of the individual issues.”

— Benjamin Graham

146. “The punches you miss are the ones that wear you out. – Boxing trainer Angelo Dundee.”

— Benjamin Graham

147. “A cynic once told G. K. Chesterton, the British novelist and essayist, “Blessed is he who expecteth nothing, for he shall not be disappointed.” Chesterton’s rejoinder? “Blessed is he who expecteth nothing, for he shall enjoy everything.”

— Benjamin Graham

148. “Many progressive economists insist that gold is now in essentially the same position as silver and that the arguments the simon-pure gold advocates use against the white metal can be directed with equal effect against their own fetish.”

— Benjamin Graham

149. “Every corporate security may be best viewed, in the first instance, as an ownership interest in, or a claim against, a specific business enterprise.”

— Benjamin Graham

150. “Cartels have spread and will spread as long as the world lacks an effective mechanism by which balanced expansion may be achieved without a resulting disruption of prices.”

— Benjamin Graham