Charlie Munger

Acknowledging what you don't know is the dawning of wisdom.

It is one thing to think gold has some marvelous store of value because man has no way of inventing more gold or getting it very easily, so it has the advantage of rarity. Believe me, man is capable of somehow creating more bitcoin... They tell you there are rules and they can't do it. Don't believe them.

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.

Is there such thing as a cheerful pessimist? That's what I am.

If the value of a company doesn't just scream out at you, it's too close.

If you're glued together right and honorable, you will succeed. Get in there and get rid of stupidities and avoid bad people. Try teaching that to your grandchildren. The best way is by example. Fix yourself.

A banker who is allowed to borrow money at X and loan it out at X plus Y will just go crazy and do too much of it if the civilization doesn't have rules that prevent it.

In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn't read all the time - none, zero. You'd be amazed at how much Warren reads - at how much I read. My children laugh at me. They think I'm a book with a couple of legs sticking out.

The number one idea is to view a stock as an ownership of the business and to judge the staying quality of the business in terms of its competitive advantage. Look for more value in terms of discounted future cash-flow than you are paying for. Move only when you have an advantage.

We believe that almost all really good investment records will involve relatively little diversification. The basic idea that it was hard to find good investments and that you wanted to be in good investments, and therefore, you'd just find a few of them that you knew a lot about and concentrate on those seemed to me such an obviously good idea. And indeed, it's proven to be an obviously good idea. Yet 98% of the investing world doesn't follow it. That's been good for us.

The game of life is the game of everlasting learning. At least it is if you want to win.

The harder you work, the more confidence you get. But you may be working hard on something that is false.

I'm proud to be associated with the value system at Berkshire Hathaway; I think you'll make more money in the end with good ethics than bad.

Forgetting your mistakes is a terrible error if you are trying to improve your cognition.

Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when you woke up. Day by day, and at the end of the day-if you live long enough-like most people, you will get out of life what you deserve.

You're looking for a mispriced gamble. That's what investing is. And you have to know enough to know whether the gamble is mispriced. That's value investing.

You need a different checklist and different mental models for different companies. I can never make it easy by saying, 'Here are three things.' You have to derive it yourself to ingrain it in your head for the rest of your life.

Everyone has the idea of owning good companies. The problem is that they have high prices in relations to assets and earnings, and that takes all of the fun out of the game.

If you can get really good at destroying your own wrong ideas, that is a great gift.

If any successes has come to me, it came because I insisted on thinking things through. That's all I was capable of doing in life, was thinking pretty hard about trying to get the right answer, and then acting on it. I never learned to do anything else.

If all you needed to do is to figure out what company is better than others, everyone would make a lot of money. But that is not the case. They keep raising the prices to the point when the odds change.