The difference between a good business and a bad business is that good businesses throw up one easy decision after another. The bad businesses throw up painful decisions time after time.
The game of life is the game of everlasting learning. At least it is if you want to win.
Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when you woke up.
Problems frequently get easier if you turn them around in reverse. In other words, if you want to help India, the question you should ask is not “how can I help India,” it’s “what is doing the worst damage in India? What will automatically do the worst damage and how do I avoid it?”
Envy is a really stupid sin because it’s the only one you could never possibly have any fun at. There’s a lot of pain and no fun. Why would you want to get on that trolley?
Well, the first rule is that you can’t really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang ’em back. If the facts don’t hang together on a latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form.
All I want to know is where I’m going to die, so I’ll never go there.
I have a very simple idea on how to get rich. The first is to spend less than you make, and the second is to invest the difference wisely.
The iron rule of nature is: you get what you reward for. If you want ants to come, you put sugar on the floor.
You have to figure out what your own aptitudes are. If you play games where other people have the aptitudes and you don’t, you’re going to lose. And that’s as close to certain as any prediction that you can make. You have to figure out where you’ve got an edge. And you’ve got to play within your own circle of competence.
I don’t think you should spend much time being unhappy about the bad breaks. You get a lot of them, but you also get a lot of good ones. The thing to do is just to maximize your odds of using the good ones and minimizing the effects of the bad ones.
The right way to think is the way Zeckhauser plays bridge. It’s not that he’s so smart that he always knows the right answer. He just plays the odds better.
I never allow myself to have an opinion on anything that I don’t know the other side’s argument better than they do.
I think that one should recognize reality even when one doesn’t like it; indeed, especially when one doesn’t like it.
The best way to get what you want in life is to deserve what you want. How could it be otherwise? It’s not crazy enough so that the world is looking for a lot of undeserving people to reward.
The best thing a human being can do is to help another human being know more.
In my whole life, I have known no wise people who didn’t read all the time - none, zero.
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.
Knowing what you don’t know is more useful than being brilliant.
The big money is not in the buying and selling … but in the waiting.