Top 300 Charlie Munger Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Whenever you think something or some person is ruining your life, it’s you. A victimization mentality is so debilitating.”

— Charlie Munger

52. “It’s not greed that drives the world, but envy.”

— Charlie Munger

53. “Any year that you don’t destroy one of your best-loved ideas is probably a wasted year.”

— Charlie Munger

54. “It’s a good habit to trumpet your failures and be quiet about your successes.”

— Charlie Munger

55. “Great investing requires a lot of delayed gratification.”

— Charlie Munger

56. “I won't bet $100 against house odds between now and the grave.”

— Charlie Munger

57. “If you buy something because it’s undervalued, then you have to think about selling it when it approaches your calculation of its intrinsic value. That’s hard. But if you buy a few great companies, then you can sit on your ass. That’s a good thing.”

— Charlie Munger

58. “Those who will not face improvements because they are changes, will face changes that are not improvements.”

— Charlie Munger

59. “I never allow myself to have an opinion on anything that I don’t know the other side’s argument better than they do.”

— Charlie Munger

60. “Spend less than you make; always be saving something. Put it into a tax-deferred account. Over time, it will begin to amount to something. This is such a no-brainer.”

— Charlie Munger

61. “I think it is undeniably true that the human brain must work in models. The trick is to have your brain work better than the other person’s brain because it understands the most fundamental models- ones that will do most work per unit.”

— Charlie Munger

62. “There must be some wisdom in the folk saying: ‘It’s the strong swimmers who drown.’”

— Charlie Munger

63. “We have a high moral responsibility to be rational.”

— Charlie Munger

64. “Our experience tends to confirm a long-held notion that being prepared, on a few occasions in a lifetime, to act promptly in scale, in doing some simple and logical thing, will often dramatically improve the financial results of that lifetime.”

— Charlie Munger

65. “Opportunity cost is a huge filter in life. If you’ve got two suitors who are really eager to have you and one is way the hell better than the other, you do not have to spend much time with the other. And that’s the way we filter out buying opportunities.”

— Charlie Munger

66. “If people tell you what you really don’t want to hear – what’s unpleasant – there’s an almost automatic reaction of antipathy. You have to train yourself out of it.”

— Charlie Munger

67. “If you took our top fifteen decisions out, we’d have a pretty average record. It wasn’t hyperactivity, but a hell of a lot of patience. You stuck to your principles and when opportunities came along, you pounced on them with vigor.”

— Charlie Munger

68. “Rationality is not just something you do so that you can make more money, it is a binding principle. Rationality is a really good idea. You must avoid the nonsense that is conventional in one’s own time. It requires developing systems of thought that improve your batting average over time.”

— Charlie Munger

69. “Berkshire was built on the eternal verities: basic mathematics, basic horse sense, basic fear, and basic diagnosis of human nature to make predictions regarding human behavior. We stuck to the basics with a certain amount of discipline and it has worked out quite well.”

— Charlie Munger

70. “We’ve got great flexibility and a certain discipline in terms of not doing some foolish thing just to be active – discipline in avoiding just doing any damn thing just because you can’t stand inactivity.”

— Charlie Munger

71. “How you behave in one place, will help in surprising ways later.”

— Charlie Munger

72. “We don’t like trading agony for money.”

— Charlie Munger

73. “What good is envy? It’s the one sin you can’t have any fun at.”

— Charlie Munger

74. “I’m not entitled to have an opinion unless I can state the arguments against my position better than the people who are in opposition. I think that I am qualified to speak only when I’ve reached that state.”

— Charlie Munger

75. “Hard work and honesty, if you keep at it, will get you almost anything.”

— Charlie Munger

76. “It’s not supposed to be easy. Anyone who finds it easy is stupid.”

— Charlie Munger

77. “Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when you woke up.”

— Charlie Munger

78. “Proper accounting is like engineering. You need a margin of safety. Thank God we don’t design bridges and airplanes the way we do accounting.”

— Charlie Munger

79. “If you don’t allow for self-serving bias in the conduct of others, you are, again, a fool.”

— Charlie Munger

80. “Whoever makes you smarter a little earlier in life makes you better.”

— Charlie Munger

81. “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 when they got up. And, boy, does that habit help, particularly when you have a long run ahead of you.”

— Charlie Munger

82. “It’s dishonourable to stay stupider than you need to be.”

— Charlie Munger

83. “A business model that relies on trickery is doomed to fail.”

— Charlie Munger

84. “If you want to understand science, you have to understand math. In business, if you’re enumerate, you’re going to be a klutz. The good thing about business is that you don’t have to know any higher math...”

— Charlie Munger

85. “The whole concept of dividing it up into ‘value’ and ‘growth’ strikes me as twaddle. It’s convenient for a bunch of pension fund consultants to get fees prattling about and a way for one advisor to distinguish himself from another. But, to me, all intelligent investing is value investing.”

— Charlie Munger

86. “It’s very useful to have a good grasp of all the big ideas in hard and soft science. A, it gives perspective. B, it gives a way for you to organize and file away experience in your head, so to speak.”

— Charlie Munger

87. “The tradition of always looking for the answer in the most fundamental way available – that is a great tradition, and it saves a lot of time in this world.”

— Charlie Munger

88. “Clever derivatives broke dozens of companies. It killed them. Bankrupt. We don’t need these kinds of innovation in finance. It’s OK to be boring in finance. What we want is innovation in widgets.”

— Charlie Munger

89. “We get these questions a lot from the enterprising young. It’s a very intelligent question: You look at some old guy who’s rich and you ask, ‘How can I become like you, except faster?’”

— Charlie Munger

90. “Just keep your head down and do your best.”

— Charlie Munger

91. “When I run into a paradox I think either I’m a total horse’s ass to have gotten to this point, or I’m fruitfully near the edge of my discipline. It adds excitement to life to wonder which it is.”

— Charlie Munger

92. “Mimicking the herd invites regression to the mean.”

— Charlie Munger

93. “We’ve had the most massive creation of wealth for people a lot younger than those who formerly got wealth in the history of the world. The world is full of young people who really want to get rich, and when I left school nobody thought it was a reasonable possibility.”

— Charlie Munger

94. “Accounting is a big subject and there are huge forces in play. The entire momentum of existing thinking and existing custom is in a direction that allows terrible follies to happen, and the terrible follies have terrible consequences.”

— Charlie Munger

95. “I know just enough about thermodynamics to understand that if it takes too much fossil-fuel energy to create ethanol, that’s a very stupid way to solve an energy problem.”

— Charlie Munger

96. “Cicero’s words also increased my personal satisfaction by supporting my long-standing rejection of a conventional point of view.”

— Charlie Munger

97. “Investing is where you find a few great companies and then sit on your ass.”

— Charlie Munger

98. “Derivative trading with mark-to-market accounting degenerates into mark-to-model. Two firms make a big derivative trade and the accountants on both sides show a large profit from the same trade.”

— Charlie Munger

99. “Litigation is notoriously time-consuming, inefficient, costly and unpredictable.”

— Charlie Munger

100. “I’m used to people with very high IQs knowing how to recognize reality, but there’s a huge human tendency where it may be instructive to think that whatever you’re doing to succeed is all right.”

— Charlie Munger