Top 80 Morgan Housel Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Things that have never happened before happen all the time.”

— Morgan Housel

2. “Napoleon’s definition of a military genius was, “The man who can do the average thing when all those around him are going crazy.”

— Morgan Housel

3. “But there’s only one way to stay wealthy: some combination of frugality and paranoia.”

— Morgan Housel

4. “More than your salary. More than the size of your house. More than the prestige of your job. Control over doing what you want, when you want to, with the people you want to, is the broadest lifestyle variable that makes people happy.”

— Morgan Housel

5. “Nothing is as good or as bad as it seems.”

— Morgan Housel

6. “Risk is what’s left over when you think you’ve thought of everything.”

— Morgan Housel

7. “A plan is only useful if it can survive reality.”

— Morgan Housel

8. “In fact, the most important part of every plan is planning on your plan not going according to plan. Now, let me show you how this applies to you.”

— Morgan Housel

9. “Spending money to show people how much money you have is the fastest way to have less money.”

— Morgan Housel

10. “Psychologist Philip Tetlock once wrote: “We need to believe we live in a predictable, controllable world, so we turn to authoritative-sounding people who promise to satisfy that need.”

— Morgan Housel

11. “Every job looks easy when you’re not the one doing it because the challenges faced by someone in the arena are often invisible to those in the crowd.”

— Morgan Housel

12. “Saving is the gap between your ego and your income.”

— Morgan Housel

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

— Morgan Housel

14. “Controlling your time is the highest dividend money pays.”

— Morgan Housel

15. “Expecting things to be bad is the best way to be pleasantly surprised when they’re not. Which, ironically, is something to be optimistic about.”

— Morgan Housel

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

— Morgan Housel

17. “Optimism sounds like a sales pitch. Pessimism sounds like someone trying to help you.”

— Morgan Housel

18. “Be careful who you praise and admire. Be careful who you look down upon and wish to avoid becoming.”

— Morgan Housel

19. “Progress happens too slowly to notice, but setbacks happen too quickly to ignore. There are lots of overnight tragedies. There are rarely overnight miracles.”

— Morgan Housel

20. “Everything has a price, but not all prices appear on labels.”

— Morgan Housel

21. “Happiness, as it’s said, is just results minus expectations.”

— Morgan Housel

22. “True success is exiting some rat race to modulate one’s activities for peace of mind.” I like that.”

— Morgan Housel

23. “What seems crazy to you might make sense to me.”

— Morgan Housel

24. “If you give luck and risk their proper respect, you realize that when judging people’s financial success – both your own and others’ – it’s never as good or as bad as it seems.”

— Morgan Housel

25. “The ability to do what you want, when you want, for as long as you want, has an infinite ROI.”

— Morgan Housel

26. “It’s a subtle recognition that people generally aspire to be respected and admired by others, and using money to buy fancy things may bring less of it than you imagine. If respect and admiration are your goal, be careful how you seek it. Humility, kindness, and empathy will bring you more respect than horsepower ever will.”

— Morgan Housel

27. “Good decisions aren’t always rational.”

— Morgan Housel

28. “Less ego, more wealth. Saving money is the gap between your ego and your income, and wealth is what you don’t see. So wealth is created by suppressing what you could buy today in order to have more stuff or more options in the future. No matter how much you earn, you will never build wealth unless you can put a lid on how much fun you can have with your money right now, today.”

— Morgan Housel

29. “The End of History Illusion is what psychologists call the tendency for people to be keenly aware of how much they’ve changed in the past, but to underestimate how much their personalities, desires, and goals are likely to change in the future.”

— Morgan Housel

30. “Plan to survive reality. Future filled with unknown is everyone’s reality.”

— Morgan Housel

31. “Everything in finance is data within the context of expectations.”

— Morgan Housel

32. “You might think you want an expensive car, a fancy watch, and a huge house. But I’m telling you, you don’t. What you want is respect and admiration from other people, and you think having expensive stuff will bring it. It almost never does – especially from the people you want to respect and admire you.”

— Morgan Housel

33. “Richard Feynman, the great physicist, once said, “Imagine how much harder physics would be if electrons had feelings.” Well, investors have feelings.”

— Morgan Housel

34. “We all think we know how the world works. But we’ve all only experienced a tiny sliver of it.”

— Morgan Housel

35. “A good definition of an investing genius is the man or woman who can do the average thing when all those around them are going crazy. Tails drive everything.”

— Morgan Housel

36. “The correct lesson to learn from surprises is that the world is surprising. Not that we should use past surprises as a guide to future boundaries; that we should use past surprises as an admission that we have no idea what might happen next.”

— Morgan Housel

37. “The challenge for us is that no amount of studying or open-mindedness can genuinely recreate the power of fear and uncertainty.”

— Morgan Housel

38. “There is the old pilot quip that their jobs are “hours and hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.”

— Morgan Housel

39. “History is littered with good ideas taken too far, which are indistinguishable from bad ideas. The wisdom in having room for error is acknowledging that uncertainty, randomness, and chance – “unknowns” – are an ever-present part of life. The only way to deal with them is by increasing the gap between what you think will happen and what can happen while still leaving you capable of fighting another day.”

— Morgan Housel

40. “It’s not whether you’re right or wrong that’s important,” George Soros once said, “but how much money you make when you’re right and how much you lose when you’re wrong.” You can be wrong half the time and still make a fortune.”

— Morgan Housel

41. “If expectations rise with results there is no logic in striving for more because you’ll feel the same after putting in extra effort. It gets dangerous when the taste of having more – more money, more power, more prestige – increases ambition faster than satisfaction. In that case one step forward pushes the goalpost two steps ahead. You feel as if you’re falling behind, and the only way to catch up is to take greater and greater amounts of risk.”

— Morgan Housel

42. “And since you can build wealth without a high income, but have no chance of building wealth without a high savings rate, it’s clear which one matters more.”

— Morgan Housel

43. “I love Voltaire’s observation that “History never repeats itself; man always does.”

— Morgan Housel

44. “Yes, but I have something he will never have... enough.”

— Morgan Housel

45. “Compounding works best when you can give a plan years or decades to grow. This is true for not only savings but careers and relationships. Endurance is key. And when you consider our tendency to change who we are over time, balance at every point in your life becomes a strategy to avoid future regret and encourage endurance.”

— Morgan Housel

46. “Intelligence is not a reliable advantage in a world that’s become as connected as ours has. But flexibility is.”

— Morgan Housel

47. “Growth is driven by compounding, which always takes time. Destruction is driven by single points of failure, which can happen in seconds, and loss of confidence, which can happen in an instant.”

— Morgan Housel

48. “Daniel Kahneman once told me about the stories people tell themselves to make sense of the past. He said: Hindsight, the ability to explain the past, gives us the illusion that the world is understandable. It gives us the illusion that the world makes sense, even when it doesn’t make sense. That’s a big deal in producing mistakes in many fields.”

— Morgan Housel

49. “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.”

— Morgan Housel

50. “Conservative is avoiding a certain level of risk. Margin of safety is raising the odds of success at a given level of risk by increasing your chances of survival. Its magic is that the higher your margin of safety, the smaller your edge needs to be to have a favorable outcome.”

— Morgan Housel