MEMORABLE QUOTES TO BOOST YOUR GROWTH
MONEY | INVESTING | ENTREPRENEURSHIP | CRITICAL THINKING | MINDSET
I believe quotes offer a quick, timely burst of wisdom, giving us the inspiration we need in the moment and introducing us to great minds and works.
Most of these gems come directly from my collection of favourite books—a library I consider a self-guided mentorship program.
Enjoy this list of my favourite quotes, regularly collected and updated.
Money & Wealth Dynamics
Money is not important. A lot of money is important. But that [100 M $] is not enough.
Stop asking $3 questions and start asking $30,000 questions.
While money can't buy happiness, it certainly lets you choose your own form of misery.
Money is like water. Everyone uses it, but we all tend to waste it. Few of us are able to store it properly or leverage its power. If we leave it idle, we spoil it.
The money you have gives you freedom, the money you pursue enslaves you.
When most people say, they want to be a millionaire, what they might actually mean is 'I'd like to spend a million dollars.' And that is literally the opposite of being a millionaire.
Instead of asking, 'What should I do in my portfolio?' Ask, 'What should I do outside of my portfolio?' Because, in the grand scheme of things, your investment portfolio is just one part of your financial picture...
If you think too much about money, you can't see the forest from the tree! Look for the productive assets (the forest), not the money (the tree).
Taxes are indeed very heavy (but) we are taxed twice as much by our idleness, three times as much by our pride, and four times as much by our folly.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
Read people's incentives and you'll understand their behaviour.
You're free when no one can buy your time.
The real value of money is what you create with it.
The real value of money is its actual purchasing power. Nothing less, nothing more.
I remember saying to my mentor, 'If I had more money, I would have a better plan.' He quickly responded, 'I would suggest that if you had a better plan, you would have more money.' You see, it's not the amount that counts; it's the plan that counts.
There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor. The poor can think of nothing else.
Money can buy many things, but nothing is more valuable than your time, your freedom and your peace of mind.
Money is a great servant but a bad master.
Wealth is not about having a lot of money; it's about having a lot of options.
No matter how much money you have. If you're still worried, you aren't wealthy.
The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.
Too many people spend money they earned... to buy things they don't want... to impress people that they don't like.
Stocks are investments. Cash is not. The worst investment you can have is cash. Cash is going to become worthless over time. But good businesses are going to become worth more.
When you invest, you are buying a day you won't have to work.
If you don't find a way to make money while you sleep, you will work until you die.
The shortest route to wealth is the contempt of wealth.
A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.
Wealth is the slave to the wise but master of the fools.
Don't tell me where your priorities are. Show me where you spend your money, and I'll tell you what they are.
Do not revel in great luxury, lest you become impoverished by its expense. Do not become a beggar by feasting on borrowed money when you have nothing in your purse.
I want to think about things where I have an advantage over others. I don't want to play a game where people have an advantage over me. God bless our stupid competitors. They make us rich.
Like Warren, I had a considerable passion to get rich, not because I wanted Ferraris — I wanted the independence. I desperately wanted it.
Wealth vs Well-being. Money fills your wallet. People fill your life.
On Wealth and Fulfilment. 'I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of, so they can see that it’s not the answer.'
Broke is such a harsh word. I prefer illiquid.
Conspicuous consumption is a poor person's idea of a rich man.
Wealth is ultimately free. It is unhappiness that is truly expensive.
Saving, Frugality & Financial Autonomy
In Texas they call them 'big hat, no cattle'. Don't pretend, don't show what you are not. Don't be a joke! Live within your means.
If the amount of money I saved each month didn't hurt, I wasn't saving enough.
No one ever complained of having too many savings.
The habit of saving is itself an education; it fosters every virtue, teaches self-denial, cultivates the sense of order, trains forethought, and so broadens the mind.
If you overlook money management, you will end up with money problems. You become financially insecure. Save and invest 'enough' and set up an automated system.
It is not what you earn that makes you rich, but what you spend on.
Earn as much as you can. Save as much as you can. Invest as much as you can.
If your expectations run higher than your income, you will never be happy.
Personal Finance. If you buy what you don't need, you steal from yourself.
Please, save and invest as your life depends on it, because it does.
On the importance of self-reliance. If I do not help myself, who will help me
A bad laundress never finds the right stone / la cattiva lavandaia non trova mai la pietra giusta.
The Philosophy Of Investing & Risk
Bulls make money. Bears make money. Pigs get slaughtered.
The Concept of surviving on average is irrelevant. You have to survive every day. Which means, really, that you have to survive on the bad days.
In most fields, the harder you try, the better you do. There is a strong correlation between effort and outcome. That's not the case in investing.
Markets can remain irrational more than you can remain solvent.
Far more money has been lost by investors preparing for corrections or trying to anticipate corrections than has been lost in corrections themselves.
Time in the market beats timing the market.
The trick in risk management is in recognising that normal is not a state of nature but a state of transition and that trend is not destiny.
I view diversification not only as a survival strategy but as an aggressive strategy because the next windfall might come from a surprising place.
In the short run, returns are virtually unknowable, but in the long run, they are virtually inevitable.
I can calculate the movement of the stars, but not the madness of men.
Just keep buying.
When investing, keep a margin of safety. Survival is the highest return of all.
We buy stocks so we can eat well, but we buy bonds so we can sleep well.
Chasing the last [investment] winners is like choosing the last winner lottery number.
To everyone who finds the current investment climate hard and difficult and somewhat confusing, I would say: Welcome to adult life.
Benign neglect is the secret to long-term investing success.
One thing a lot of investors do is cut their flowers and water their weeds. Sell the things that didn't work out, and let the things that are working outrun.
If you're not willing to react with equanimity to a market price decline of fifty per cent two or three times a century, you're not fit to be a common shareholder...
Successful investing is to avoid anything that is too hard.
Investing is a constant process of calculating the odds. It's all probabilities. There is no certainty.
Free trading is like giving chainsaws to toddlers.
Be Fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful.
If past history was all that was needed to play the game of money, the richest people would be librarians.
You don't need to be a rocket scientist. Investment is not a game where the guy with 160 IQ beats the guy with 130 IQ.
Rule No. 1: Never lose money. Rule No. 2: Never forget rule No. 1.
The most important quality for an investor is temperament, not intellect. You need a temperament that neither derives great pleasure from being with the crowd or against the crowd.
Risk means more things can happen than will happen.
The gulf between 'risky' and 'feels risky' is huge. If your compass involves avoiding things that feel risky, get better informed.
There is the risk you cannot afford to take, and there is the risk you cannot afford not to take.
The biggest risk is not taking risks... the only strategy guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.
Not taking a risk is a risk itself.
Risk Avoidance vs Risk Management: not all risks are meant to be avoided. Some are just meant to be managed.
Gold is money. Everything else is credit.
We should never confuse brains with a bull market.
Buying a bond only for its yield is like getting married only for the sex.
The Stock Market is designed to transfer money from the active to the patient.
To me, the primary task in investing is to test and then retest some more the parameters and paradigms that appear to govern daily events...
The stock doesn't know you own it.
The intrinsic value of an asset is determined by the cash flows you expect that asset to generate over its life and how uncertain you feel about these cash flows.
Diversification is a safety factor that is essential because we should be humble enough to admit we can be wrong.
He once joked that any firm which hires an economist has one employee too many, and says he has never made any investment decision based on an economic prediction.
Concentration is always a symptom of some driving force. America's current dominance is familiar... but diversification away from success is unlikely to leave investors happy.
Risk. Interest on the debt grows without rain. [While agriculture yields rely on it].
The big money is not in the buying and selling, but in the waiting.
There are worse situations than drowning in cash and sitting, sitting, sitting.
A great business at a fair price is superior to a fair business at a great price.
Entrepreneurship, Career & Professional
Don't go all in. In fact, do the opposite. Don't quit your day job. Work 8 hours, sleep and eat for 8, then spend the final 8 trying to figure out if your idea is good.
You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later stage.
Your calendar is a better measure of success than your bank account.
Figure out what you like, and what you can likely do, for which there is sustainable and underserved demand... You need to be nearly fanatic at it.
The first step is to find what you are genuinely interested in... If you're interested, you're dangerous.
It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you will do things differently.
Trust is earned in drops and lost in buckets.
If you want to make everyone happy don't be a leader. Sell ice cream.
Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.
Progress, not perfection. Perfectionism is just an advanced form of procrastination.
Lawyers are like nuclear weapons. By all rights, they shouldn't exist, but if some people have them, then you'd better have one too.
How to build a career in 7 steps: (1) Do great work (2) Share it publicly (3) Cold email people 2 steps ahead (4) Talk about work (5) Host events (6) Become friends (7) Rise together.
Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.
The first draft of everything is s#hit.
Entrepreneurship is a personal growth engine disguised as a business pursuit.
Ignore the hype of the startups that you see in the press. Mostly it's a pack of lies.
If you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late.
Start before you feel ready.
You are not separate from your goals by a number of years but by a number of actions.
To open a business is very easy; to keep it open is very difficult.
I do not choose to be a common man, it is my right to be uncommon... to take the calculated risk; to dream and to build. To fail and to succeed.
The three stages of career development are: 1. I want to be in the meeting; 2 I want to run the meeting; 3. I want to avoid meetings.
The Amount of Money We Receive will Always Be in a Direct Ratio to the Demand for What We Do, Our Ability to Do It, and the Difficulty in Replacing Us.
Hustle until your haters ask if you are hiring.
Sweat is the cologne of Success.
While we cannot direct the wind, we can adjust the sails, pushing and supporting our companies to work relentlessly on performance here and now...
The opportunity's dichotomy. The strategy required to find a great opportunity (lots of saying yes) is different from the strategy required to make the most of a great opportunity (lots of saying no).
Stop thinking you need an MBA... What you need is tolerance for risk. You need passion. And, above all else, you need an idea.
The investment process. Long term, there is a strong correlation between process and outcomes.
Mira Murati comments on AI’s impact on creative jobs: 'Some creative jobs maybe will go away, but maybe they shouldn’t have been there in the first place.'
Mindset, Ownership & Self-Discipline
I tell my kids, what is the difference between a hero and a coward? Only what you do. They both feel the same... The hero is more disciplined and he fights those feelings off and does what he has to do.
Those who are afraid die every day. Those who are unafraid will only die once.
I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it.
Everything you have ever wanted is sitting on the other side of fear.
Everyone has a plan until he gets punched in the face.
Every Battle Is Won Before It Is Ever Fought.
A Goal without a Plan is just a wish.
Decisions. Hats, haircuts, and tattoos. Most decisions are like hats: try them, low cost. Some are like haircuts: foolish for a while but fixable. A few are like tattoos: irreversible.
If you commit to nothing, you will be distracted by anything.
The difference between good and great results is often found in consistently doing the boring things you know you should do exactly when you feel like doing them the least.
One of the most valuable skills you can adopt in life is doing things when you don't feel like doing them.
Discipline is a muscle to exercise, habits are routines to be built. Discipline helps you when you fall out of the habit.
Don't take control. Take charge. I might not be in control of what happens to me in life, but I am in charge of how I respond to it.
Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal.
The quicker you want something, the easier you are to manipulate.
What we know is good for us, in the long run, seems contrary to what we think is pleasant or pleasurable in the short run.
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without a crack showing. Yet at the hundred and first blow, it splits in two...
To conquer the large, Begin with the small. To change your world, Begin by changing yourself.
Avoid stupidity is easier than seeking brilliance.
Discipline equals freedom.
We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten.
Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response.
It is impossible to get better and look good at the same time.
One way to spot a poor thinker is to see how many of their decisions boomerang back to them. Good thinking is expensive, but poor thinking costs a fortune.
You have to want the lifestyle, not just the outcomes. Otherwise, it doesn't make any sense.
The battle is between two 'wolves' inside us all. One is Evil (anger, lies, self-pity). The other is Good (peace, truth, humility). Grandson asks which wolf wins? The grandfather replies: 'The one you feed.'
One of the biggest keys to success at anything hard is believing that you can figure it out as you go along.
What's boring doesn't get attention and what's exciting doesn't drive results. It's the repetition of the boring basics that makes a difference.
We have met the enemy, and he is us.
It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.
Your mood is the first thing you create each morning. Shape it with intention, or it will shape you without consent.
If you are waiting for inspiration, you have already lost.
On the importance of understanding the different mindsets and timelines in a conflict. 'You have the watches, but we have the time.'
Intellectual Honesty, Truth & The Value Of
To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.
Niccolo Macchiavelli describes entering his study: 'And at the door, I take off the day's clothing, covered with mud and dust... entirely I give myself over to them.'
Reading good books is like engaging in conversation with the most cultivated minds of past centuries...
I believe in the discipline of mastering the best that other people have ever figured out.
A good book library is your self-guided mentorship program.
If you haven't read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate, and you will be incompetent because your personal experiences alone aren't broad enough.
Full ownership of a book only comes when you have made it a part of yourself, and the best way is by writing in it.
A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short.
What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence. (Hitchens's razor).
In my whole life, I have known no wise people who didn't read all the time — none, zero.
The first rule is that you can't really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang 'em back.
People calculate too much and think too little.
The most expensive thing in the world is experience. By spending a few dollars on a book, the thoughts and life's work of a great man are available to us.
Doubt those who find the truth. Believe those who are seeking it.
We know they are lying. They know they are lying... And still, they continue to lie.
The value of books. Books are the training weights of the mind.
Be a free thinker. Don't take refuge in the false security of consensus.
We Don't Know Who Discovered Water, But We Know It Wasn't a Fish
Happiness, Perspective & Life Wisdom
Loving one's work constitutes the best concrete approximation to happiness on earth.
It is not happy people who are thankful, it is thankful people who are happy.
There must have been some deeper reason why God created human beings. People busy with useful work are happier than those who are idle.
I do not like the idea of happiness — it is too momentary. I would say that I was always busy and interested in something — interest has more meaning.
Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it.
If you don't get everything you want, think of the things you don't get that you don't want.
Whereas pain is a physical experience, suffering is a mental one. Its antidote is Acceptance.
The expectation is the grandfather of disappointment. The world can never own a man who wants nothing.
A healthy man wants a thousand things, a sick man only wants one.
Hanging onto resentment is letting someone you despise live rent-free in your head.
Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when you woke up.
When confronted with the possibility of going blind and no longer being able to read he said: 'It's time for me to learn braille!'
When you are cold, don't expect sympathy from someone who's warm.
Human beings are born with different capacities. If they are free, they are not equal. And if they are equal, they are not free.
The world will ask you who you are, and if you don't know, the world will tell you.
We tend to take every precaution to safeguard our possessions because we know what they cost. But we neglect things more precious because they have no price tag: eyesight, freedom.
You know why it is hard to be happy? It is because we refuse to let go of things that make us sad.
An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind.
20 years from now, the only people who will remember that you worked late are your kids.
Curiosity killed the cat but also cured polio.
It is easier to adjust ourselves to the hardships of a poor living than to the hardships of making a better one.
Nobody wants to believe happiness is a choice, because that puts responsibility in their hands.
Time. The bad news is that time flies. The good news is you are the pilot.
When anxiety grips you, ask: what would 90-year-old me give to have this problem?
It is a good day. I woke up.
Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.