Top 120 Peter Lynch Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Invest in businesses any idiot could run, because someday one will.”

— Peter Lynch

52. “The Rule of 72 is useful in determining how fast money will grow. Take the annual return from any investment, expressed as a percentage, and divide it into 72. The result is the number of years it will take to double your money.”

— Peter Lynch

53. “Owning stocks is like having children – don’t get involved with more than you can handle.”

— Peter Lynch

54. “If a picture is worth a thousand words, in business, so is a number.”

— Peter Lynch

55. “Absent a lot of surprises, stocks are relatively predictable over twenty years. As to whether they’re going to be higher or lower in two to three years, you might as well flip a coin to decide.”

— Peter Lynch

56. “More money is lost anticipating the changes in the overall stock market than any other way of investing.”

— Peter Lynch

57. “I’m always fully invested. It’s a great feeling to be caught with your pants up.”

— Peter Lynch

58. “The natural-born investor is a myth.”

— Peter Lynch

59. “My method for picking stocks has never changed. When businesses go from crappy to semicrappy, there’s money to be made.”

— Peter Lynch

60. “Long shots almost always miss the mark.”

— Peter Lynch

61. “It’s human nature to keep doing something as long as it’s pleasurable and you can succeed at it, which is why the world population continues to double every 40 years.”

— Peter Lynch

62. “If you have the stomach for stocks, but neither the time nor the inclination to do the homework, invest in equity mutual funds.”

— Peter Lynch

63. “If you hope to have more money tomorrow than you have today, you’ve got to put a chunk of your assets into stocks. Sooner or later, a portfolio of stocks or stock mutual funds will turn out to be a lot more valuable than a portfolio of bonds or CDs or money-market funds.”

— Peter Lynch

64. “If you go to Minnesota in January, you should know that it’s gonna be cold. You don’t panic when the thermometer falls below zero.”

— Peter Lynch

65. “You have to keep your priorities straight if you plan to do well in stocks.”

— Peter Lynch

66. “Twenty years in this business convinces me that any normal person using the customary three percent of the brain can pick stocks just as well, if not better, than the average Wall Street expert.”

— Peter Lynch

67. “When management owns stock, then rewarding the shareholders becomes a first priority, whereas when management simply collects a paycheck, then increasing salaries becomes a first priority.”

— Peter Lynch

68. “In stocks as in romance, ease of divorce is not a sound basis for commitment.”

— Peter Lynch

69. “Your investor’s edge is not something you get from Wall Street experts. It’s something you already have. You can outperform the experts if you use your edge by investing in companies or industries you already understand.”

— Peter Lynch

70. “There’s lots of stocks out there and all you need is a few of ’em. That’s been my philosophy.”

— Peter Lynch

71. “Long-term investing has gotten so popular, it’s easier to admit you’re a crack addict than to admit you’re a short-term investor.”

— Peter Lynch

72. “Visiting stores and testing products is one of the critical elements of the analyst’s job.”

— Peter Lynch

73. “In this business if you’re good, you’re right six times out of ten. You’re never going to be right nine times out of ten.”

— Peter Lynch

74. “Gentlemen who prefer bonds don’t know what they’re missing.”

— Peter Lynch

75. “You just don’t know when you can find the bottom.”

— Peter Lynch

76. “Remember, things are never clear until it’s too late.”

— Peter Lynch

77. “Go for a business that any idiot can run – because sooner or later, any idiot probably is going to run it.”

— Peter Lynch

78. “The basic story remains simple and never-ending. Stocks aren’t lottery tickets. There’s a company attached to every share.”

— Peter Lynch

79. “You can find good reasons to scuttle your equities in every morning paper and on every broadcast of the nightly news.”

— Peter Lynch

80. “You shouldn’t just pick a stock – you should do your homework.”

— Peter Lynch

81. “There are substantial rewards for adopting a regular routine of investing and following it no matter what, and additional rewards for buying more shares when most investors are scared into selling.”

— Peter Lynch

82. “It isn’t the head but the stomach that determines the fate of the stockpicker.”

— Peter Lynch

83. “The extravagance of any corporate office is directly proportional to management’s reluctance to reward the shareholders.”

— Peter Lynch

84. “I’ve found that when the market’s going down and you buy funds wisely, at some point in the future you will be happy. You won’t get there by reading ‘Now is the time to buy.’”

— Peter Lynch

85. “I talk to hundreds of companies a year and spend hour after hour in heady pow-wows with CEOs, financial analysts and my colleagues in the mutual-fund business, but I stumble onto the big winners in extracurricular situations, the same way you do.”

— Peter Lynch

86. “The junior high schools and high schools of America have forgotten to teach one of the most important courses of all. Investing.”

— Peter Lynch

87. “The trick is not to learn to trust your gut feelings, but rather to discipline yourself to ignore them. Stand by your stocks as long as the fundamental story of the company hasn’t changed.”

— Peter Lynch

88. “All you need for a lifetime of successful investing is a few big winners, and the pluses from those will overwhelm the minuses from the stocks that don’t work out.”

— Peter Lynch

89. “There’s a company behind every stock and a reason companies – and their stocks – perform the way they do.”

— Peter Lynch

90. “If all the economists in the world were laid end to end, it wouldn’t be a bad thing.”

— Peter Lynch

91. “If you’re lucky enough to have been rewarded in life to the degree that I have, there comes a point at which you have to decide whether to become a slave to your net worth by devoting the rest of your life to increasing it or to let what you’ve accumulated begin to serve you.”

— Peter Lynch

92. “Investing in stocks is an art, not a science, and people who’ve been trained to rigidly quantify everything have a big disadvantage.”

— Peter Lynch

93. “Big companies have small moves, small companies have big moves.”

— Peter Lynch

94. “I don’t go near the money and the money doesn’t go near me.”

— Peter Lynch

95. “When you start to confuse Freddie Mac, Sallie Mae and Fannie Mae with members of your family, and you remember 2,000 stock symbols but forget the children’s birthdays, there’s a good chance you’ve become too wrapped up in your work.”

— Peter Lynch

96. “People who succeed in the stock market also accept periodic losses, setbacks, and unexpected occurrences. Calamitous drops do not scare them out of the game.”

— Peter Lynch

97. “Everyone has the brainpower to follow the stock market. If you made it through fifth-grade math, you can do it.”

— Peter Lynch

98. “Find something you enjoy doing and give it everything you’ve got, and the money will take care of itself.”

— Peter Lynch

99. “This is one of the keys to successful investing: focus on the companies, not on the stocks.”

— Peter Lynch

100. “Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. Suicide is a choice and I think if we work with that with kids, we’ll get somewhere.”

— Peter Lynch