Top 50 William J. Bernstein Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The definition of investment is the deferring ofpresent consumption for future consumption. So, you dohave to be willing to defer. And there are a couple of tricks that you can use to save money. One of them is simply to pay yourself first.”

— William J. Bernstein

2. “Investment success accrues not so much to the brilliant as to the disciplined.”

— William J. Bernstein

3. “Personal finance, like most important aspects of life, is a never-ending quest. The competent investor never stops learning.”

— William J. Bernstein

4. “The purpose of investing is not to simply optimise returns and make yourself rich. The purpose is not to die poor.”

— William J. Bernstein

5. “Do the math. Expect catastrophes. Whatever happens, stay the course.”

— William J. Bernstein

6. “There are two kinds of investors, be thay large or small: those who don’t know where the market is headed, and those who don’t know that they don’t know.”

— William J. Bernstein

7. “If your broker or investment advisor is not familiar with the concept of standard deviation of returns, get a new one.”

— William J. Bernstein

8. “The reason that ‘guru’ is such a popular word is because ‘charlatan’ is so hard to spell.”

— William J. Bernstein

9. “The typical fund company services 401k plan participants in the same way that Baby Face Nelson serviced banks.”

— William J. Bernstein

10. “Wall Street is littered with the bones of those who knew just what to do, but could not bring themselves to do it.”

— William J. Bernstein

11. “Bluntly put, there’s no chance that your doctor, dentist, or attorney is a high-school dropout. Your stockbroker, however, just might be.”

— William J. Bernstein

12. “The key aspect of an index fund is that many of them, not all of them, but many of them are extremely cheap.”

— William J. Bernstein

13. “Only an income-producing possession, such as a stock, bond, or working piece of real estate is a true investment.”

— William J. Bernstein

14. “When it comes to fund managers and market strategists, this year’s hero usually turns into next year’s zero.”

— William J. Bernstein

15. “If you want to convince someone, target their System 1 with narrative, not their System 2 with facts and data.”

— William J. Bernstein

16. “Manifestly, man is the ape that imitates, tells stories, seeks status, morally condemns others, and yearns for the good old days, all of which guarantee a human future studded with religious and financial mass manias.”

— William J. Bernstein

17. “The essence of effective portfolio construction is the use of a large number of poorly correlated assets.”

— William J. Bernstein

18. “George Bernard Shaw’s famous spelling of “fish” as “ghoti” – the first two letters pronounced as the last two in “tough,” the middle letter as in “women,” and the last two as in “nation.”

— William J. Bernstein

19. “You have to ask yourself, what are the things that matter to you most in your life? If you have to have a latte every day that’snice to have right now, but if you take that latte every day right now, you may wind up eating cat food when you are 70. And you have to decide which is worse.”

— William J. Bernstein

20. “A fast food job, for most people, should be an entry level position. If you see no path for advancement beyond that, it’s time to take a real fast look at your human capital and learn a skill that will make you more money.”

— William J. Bernstein

21. “Although the Romans knew Chinese silk, they knew not China. They believed that silk grew directly on the mulberry tree, not realizing that the leaves were merely the worm’s home and its food.”

— William J. Bernstein

22. “Mutual fund manager performance does not persist and the return of stock picking is zero.”

— William J. Bernstein

23. “If you find yourself stimulated in any way by your portfolio performance, then you are probably doing something very wrong. A superior portfolio strategy should be intrinsically boring.”

— William J. Bernstein

24. “It’s bad enough that you have to take market risk. Only a fool takes on the additional risk of doing yet more damage by failing to diversify properly with his or her nest egg. Avoid the problem-buy a well-run index fund and own the whole market.”

— William J. Bernstein

25. “The highly decentralized nature of the medieval world of Indian Ocean trade produced a bubbling stew of Darwinian economic competition, in which those states whose political “mutations” were best suited to trade and commerce thrived, and those whose institutions were not withered.”

— William J. Bernstein

26. “The deeper one delves, the worse things look for actively managed funds.”

— William J. Bernstein

27. “All the things that make us human make us terrible investors and you have to understand what they are and how to avoid them.”

— William J. Bernstein

28. “Christians and Jews often taunted the Arabs about their polytheistic beliefs and their lack of an overarching creed and an afterlife. Consequently, a sense of religious inferiority arose among the desert dwellers, along with a pent-up desire for a comprehensive belief system of their own.”

— William J. Bernstein

29. “You have to understand what market history looks like. What market history tells you is that the very, very best investments are made when things look the worst.”

— William J. Bernstein

30. “Although the modern image of the imperial city is dominated by the ruins of the Coliseum and the Forum, the economic life of ancient Rome centered on side streets filled with apartments, shops, and horrea.”

— William J. Bernstein

31. “For the taxable investor, indexing means never having to say you’re sorry.”

— William J. Bernstein

32. “Athens, while remaining nominally independent, no longer commanded its lifelines or its fate. Just as it had invented many Western institutions and intellectual and artistic endeavors, so did it pioneer a less glorious tradition. In the centuries following the Peloponnesian war, Athens became the first in a long line of senescent Western empires to suffer the ignominious transformation from world power to open-air theme park, famous only for its arts, its architecture, its schools, and its past.”

— William J. Bernstein

33. “99% of fund managers demonstrate no evidence of skill whatsoever.”

— William J. Bernstein

34. “The easiest way to get rich is to spend as little as possible.”

— William J. Bernstein

35. “The Stoic philosopher and playwright Seneca is said to have owned five hundred tripod tables with ivory legs – no small irony, since he was a vocal critic of the empire’s extravagances.”

— William J. Bernstein

36. “As populations grow beyond Dunbar’s number, face-to-face contact no longer suffices to maintain political control. At this point, writing supplies the best mechanism for communicating among large numbers of people, and power naturally accrues to the literate. Consequently, societies with high rates of literacy, such as Athens, tend to have more smoothly running republics than those with low rates, such as the late Roman one.”

— William J. Bernstein

37. “In one of history’s most bizarre chains of causation, the brutal, efficient newcomers were driven by a hunger for, of all things, culinary ingredients that today lie largely unused in most Western kitchens.”

— William J. Bernstein

38. “In Battuta’s obsession with sharia and the Muslim world and in his lack of interest in nearly everything outside it we clearly see the double-edged sword of Islam so visible in today’s world: an ecumenical but self-satisfied faith capable of uniting far-flung peoples under one system of belief and one regime of law, but also severely limited in its capacity to examine and borrow from others.”

— William J. Bernstein

39. “What investment banking is to the ambitious and acquisitive today, the pepper trade was to the Romans – the most direct route to great riches.”

— William J. Bernstein

40. “Nestorian Christians, expelled for their heresies from the Byzantine Empire but tolerated in the Muslim world as “people of the book,” began to arrive from the West via the overland route. It is easy to see how a splinter Christian movement, repelled by the savage intolerance of the Catholic Church and attracted by the relative tolerance of Islam, spread ever eastward.”

— William J. Bernstein

41. “Although there is a limit beyond which belief will not withstand disconfirmation, it is clear that the introduction of contrary evidence can serve to increase the conviction and enthusiasm of the believer.”

— William J. Bernstein

42. “When Vasco da Gama breached the Indian Ocean, the playing field had just been vacated by the one force capable of repelling him.”

— William J. Bernstein

43. “It is precisely Battuta’s lack of interest in peoples outside Dar-al- Islam – the world of Islam – that testifies to Muslim dominance of medieval Asian trade. In the fourteenth century, Battuta could travel 74,000 miles through Morocco, East Africa, India, central Asia, Southeast Asia, and China and remain entirely within the Muslim cultural envelope, never having to interact in a meaningful manner with those outside it in order to survive, to travel, or even to make a living.”

— William J. Bernstein

44. “Venice earned its wealth not only from rare Oriental goods, but also from the pilgrim and crusader traffic to and from the Holy Land.”

— William J. Bernstein

45. “That is, we are hardwired to detect relationships where often none exist, a tendency science writer Michael Shermer has labeled “patternicity.”

— William J. Bernstein

46. “The ancient incense trade was thus no different from the modern cocaine and heroin trades: relatively safe around the raw agricultural source, but highly risky around the finished product and its ultimate consumers.”

— William J. Bernstein

47. “While religious and financial manias might seem to have little in common, the underlying forces that give them rise are identical: the desire to improve one’s well-being in this life or the next. And the factors that amplify the contagion of financial and religious mass delusions are also similar: the hardwired human propensity to imitate, to fabricate and consume compelling narratives, and to seek status.”

— William J. Bernstein

48. “Whereas theology is the primary driving force behind Christianity and the great Eastern religions, Islam’s backbone is a system of law covering all areas of conduct, including commerce. Thus, the new monotheism from Arabia was especially attractive to those engaged in any organized economic activity that flourished wherever rules were plainly visible and vigorously enforced by disinterested parties – again, as in the more secular English common law.”

— William J. Bernstein

49. “Although the Muslim commercial web possessed many advanced features, including bills of exchange, sophisticated lending institutions, and futures markets, no Islamic state ever established the bedrock financial institution of the modern world: a national or central bank.”

— William J. Bernstein

50. “Novelists and historians have known for centuries that people do not deploy the powerful human intellect to dispassionately analyze the world, but rather to rationalize how the facts conform to their emotionally derived preconceptions.”

— William J. Bernstein