110+ Charlie Munger Quotes On Investing, Success And Learning

Charlie Munger is an American business person and investor. He is the Vice Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, the conglomerate controlled by Warren Buffett. He is also the Chairman of the Daily Journal Corporation, a newspaper publishing company. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Charlie Munger on life, investing, success.

Top 10 Charlie Munger Quotes

1. The best thing a human being can do is to help another human being know more.
2. Intelligent people make decisions based on opportunity costs.
3. Mimicking the herd invites regression to the mean.
4. I did not succeed in life by intelligence. I succeeded because I have a long attention span.
5. You particularly want to avoid working directly under somebody you don't admire and don't want to be like. It's dangerous.
6. The big money is not in the buying and selling ... but in the waiting.
7. When you locate a bargain, you must ask, 'Why me, God? Why am I the only one who could find this bargain?'
8. I believe in the discipline of mastering the best that other people have ever figured out. I don't believe in just sitting down and trying to dream it all up yourself. Nobody's that smart.
9. A lot of success in life and business comes from knowing what you want to avoid: early death, a bad marriage, etc.
10. Our job is to find a few intelligent things to do, not to keep up with every damn thing in the world.

Charlie Munger Short Quotes

• No wise pilot, no matter how great his talent and experience, fails to use his checklist.
• We try more to profit from always remembering the obvious than from grasping the esoteric.
• A great business at a fair price is superior to a fair business at a great price.
• If you don't allow for self-serving bias in the conduct of others, you are, again, a fool.
• Step by step you get ahead, but rarely in fast spurts.
• The safest way to get what you want is to deserve what you want.
• Forgetting your mistakes is a terrible error if you are trying to improve your cognition.
• There is bound to be a regression toward the mean.
• A lot of our respected financial institutions are just casinos in drag.
• There must be some wisdom in the folk saying: Its the strong swimmers who drown.

Charlie Munger Quotes About Life

Whenever you think something or some person is ruining your life, it's you. A victimization mentality is so debilitating. — Charlie Munger

In my whole life, I have known no wise people who didn't read all the time - none ... ZERO. — Charlie Munger

Opportunity cost is a huge filter in life. If you've got two suitors who are really eager to have you and one is way the hell better than the other, you do not have to spend much time with the other. And that's the way we filter out buying opportunities. — Charlie Munger

The average result has to be the average result. By definition, everybody can't beat the market. As I always say, the iron rule of life is that only 20% of the people can be in the top fifth. That's just the way it is. — Charlie Munger

A rough rule in life is that an organization foolish in one way in dealing with a complex system is all too likely to be foolish in another. — Charlie Munger

If we've been a little more successful than other people, is because we always realised that the school of life was always open, and if you were not learning more you are falling behind. — Charlie Munger

Most people will see declining returns [due to inflation]. One of the great defenses if you're worried about inflation is not to have a lot of silly needs in your life - you don't need a lot of material goods. — Charlie Munger

Your life must focus on the maximization of objectivity. — Charlie Munger

There has never been a master plan. Anyone who wanted to do it, we fired because it takes on a life of its own and doesn't cover new reality. We want people taking into account new information. — Charlie Munger

In my life there are not that many questions I can't properly deal with using my $40 adding machine and dog-eared compound interest table. — Charlie Munger

Charlie Munger Quotes About Investing

I think that, every time you saw the word EBITDA, you should substitute the word "bullshit" earnings. — Charlie Munger

Great investing requires a lot of delayed gratification. — Charlie Munger

We're emphasizing the knowable by predicting how certain people and companies will swim against the current. We're not predicting the fluctuation in the current. — Charlie Munger

Investing is where you find a few great companies and then sit on your ass. — Charlie Munger

Acquire worldly wisdom and adjust your behavior accordingly. If your new behavior gives you a little temporary unpopularity with your peer group then to hell with them. — Charlie Munger

A Lesson on Elementary, Worldly Wisdom As It Relates To Investment Management & Business — Charlie Munger

All intelligent investing is value investing - acquiring more that you are paying for. You must value the business in order to value the stock. — Charlie Munger

It never ceases to amaze me to see how much territory can be grasped if one merely masters and consistently uses all the obvious and easily learned principles. — Charlie Munger

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. — Charlie Munger

Mankind invented a system to cope with the fact that we are so intrinsically lousy at manipulating numbers. It's called the graph. — Charlie Munger

Charlie Munger Quotes About Success

It's a good habit to trumpet your failures and be quiet about your successes. — Charlie Munger

We only want what success we can get despite encouraging others to share our general view about reality. — Charlie Munger

They [Mc Donalds] take people and give them a first job, which enables them to get a second job. They do a very good job of educating troubled young people to be good citizens and they're probably more successful than charter schools. — Charlie Munger

Our success has come from the lack of oversight we've provided, and our success will continue to be from a lack of oversight. But if you're going to provide minimal oversight, you have to buy carefully. It's a different model from GE's. GE's works - it's just very different from ours. — Charlie Munger

I think track records are very important. If you start early trying to have a perfect one in some simple thing like honesty, you're well on your way to success in this world. — Charlie Munger

Ben Franklin and Samuel Johnson, he credits their wisdom for his success. "They were both utterly brilliant men. And powerful communicators. Both have helped me all the way through life. Their lessons are easy to assimilate." — Charlie Munger

You could argue that [the decline of public schools] is one of the major disasters in our lifetimes. We took one of the greatest successes in the history of the earth and turned it into one of the greatest disasters in the history of the earth. — Charlie Munger

Most people are too fretful, they worry to much. Success means being very patient, but aggressive when it's time. — Charlie Munger

Charlie Munger Quotes About Learning

The more hard lessons you can learn vicariously rather than through your own hard experience, the better. — Charlie Munger

If you don't keep learning, other people will pass you by. Temperament alone won't do it - you need a lot of curiosity for a long, long time. — Charlie Munger

I like people admitting they were complete stupid horses' asses. I know I'll perform better if I rub my nose in my mistakes. This is a wonderful trick to learn. — Charlie Munger

Warren is one of the best learning machines on this earth. The turtles who outrun the hares are learning machines. If you stop learning in this world, the world rushes right by you. — Charlie Munger

The game is to keep learning, and I don't think people are going to keep learning who don't like the learning process. — Charlie Munger

Most people early achieve and later intensify a tendency to process new and disconfirming information so that any original conclusion remains intact. They become people of whom Philip Wylie observed: "You couldn't 't squeeze a dime between what they already know and what they will never learn." — Charlie Munger

Those who keep learning, will keep rising in life — Charlie Munger

I constantly see people rise in life who are not the smartest - sometimes not even the most diligent. But they are learning machines; they go to bed every night a little wiser than when they got up. And, boy, does that habit help, particularly when you have a long run ahead of you. — Charlie Munger

The name of the game is continuing to learn. Even if you're very well trained and have some natural aptitude, you still need to keep learning. — Charlie Munger

Learn how to ignore the examples from others when they are wrong, because few skills are more worth having. — Charlie Munger

Charlie Munger Quotes About Reading

Develop into a lifelong self-learner through voracious reading; cultivate curiosity and strive to become a little wiser every day. — Charlie Munger

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. — Charlie Munger

...by regularly reading business newspaper and magazines I am exposed to an enormous amount of material at the micro level.. I find that what I see going on there pretty much informs me about what's happening at the macro level. — Charlie Munger

We both (Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett) insist on a lot of time being available almost every day to just sit and think. That is very uncommon in American business. We read and think. — Charlie Munger

For years I have read the morning paper and harrumphed. There's a lot to harrumph about now. — Charlie Munger

If you get into the mental habit of relating what you're reading to the basic structure of the underlying ideas being demonstrated, you gradually accumulate some wisdom. — Charlie Munger

If it is wisdom you're after, you're going to spend a lot of time on your ass reading. — Charlie Munger

It's been my experience in life if you just keep thinking and reading, you don't have to work. — Charlie Munger

Charlie Munger Quotes About Envy

The idea of caring is that someone is making money faster [than you are] is one of the deadly sins. 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? — Charlie Munger

The world is not driven by greed; it's driven by envy. — Charlie Munger

Even if you assume that the whole economy would work better had we never had double taxation, having the envy and resentment of the richest paying low or no taxes screams of injustice. You have to have a fair system. — Charlie Munger

It’s not greed that drives the world, but envy. — Charlie Munger

What good is envy? It’s the one sin you can’t have any fun at. — Charlie Munger

Charlie Munger Quotes About Money

I think you'll make more money in the end with good ethics than bad. Even though there are some people who do very well, like Marc Rich-who plainly has never had any decent ethics, or seldom anyway. But in the end, Warren Buffett has done better than Marc Rich-in money-not just in reputation. — Charlie Munger

Rationality is not just something you do so that you can make more money, it is a binding principle. Rationality is a really good idea. You must avoid the nonsense that is conventional in one's own time. It requires developing systems of thought that improve your batting average over time. — Charlie Munger

It's hard to predict what will happen with two brands in a market. Sometimes they will behave in a gentlemanly way, and sometimes they'll pound each other. I know of no way to predict whether they'll compete moderately or to the death. If you could figure it out, you could make a lot of money. — Charlie Munger

It's natural that you'd have more brains going into money management. There are so many huge incomes in money management and investment banking - it's like ants to sugar. There are huge incentives for a man to take up money management as opposed to, say, physics, and it's a lot easier. — Charlie Munger

It would be one of the most irritating experiences in the world to do a lot of work to uncover a fraud and then at have it go from X to 3X and at h the crooks happily partying with your money while you're meeting margin calls. Why would you want to go within hailing distance of that? — Charlie Munger

Quoting Demosthenes, 'For what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true.' I would rather make money playing a piano in a whorehouse than arguing that no cost is incurred when employees are paid in stock options instead of cash. I am not kidding. — Charlie Munger

The general systems of money management [today] require people to pretend to do something they can't do and like something they don't. It's a terrible way to spend your life, but it's very well paid. — Charlie Munger

We may well have a competitive advantage buying decent businesses at decent prices. But they won't be fabulous businesses and fabulous prices. There's too much competition and money out there, with many buyout specialists. — Charlie Munger

While no real money came down, my family gave me a good education and a marvelous example of how people should behave, and in the end that was more valuable than money. Being surrounded by the right values from the beginning is an immense treasure. Warrenhad that. It even has a financial advantage. — Charlie Munger

there are all kinds of wonderful new inventions that give you nothing as owners except the opportunity to spend a lot more money in a business that's still going to be lousy. The money still won't come to you. All of the advantages from great improvements are going to flow through to the customers. — Charlie Munger

Charlie Munger Quotes About Wealth

Wall Street has too much wealth and political power. — Charlie Munger

If all you succeed in doing in life is getting rich by buying little pieces of paper, it's a failed life. Life is more than being shrewd in wealth accumulation. — Charlie Munger

We've had the most massive creation of wealth for people a lot younger than those who formerly got wealth in the history of the world. The world is full of young people who really want to get rich, and when I left school nobody thought it was a reasonable possibility. — Charlie Munger

Someone will always be getting richer faster than you. This is not a tragedy. — Charlie Munger

If you took our top fifteen decisions out, we'd have a pretty average record. It wasn't hyperactivity, but a hell of a lot of patience. You stuck to your principles and when opportunities came along, you pounced on them with vigor. — Charlie Munger

Determine value apart from price; progress apart from activity; wealth apart from size. — Charlie Munger

Charlie Munger Quotes About Insightful

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. — Charlie Munger

We have to have a special insight, or we'll put it in the 'too tough' basket. All of you have to look for a special area of competency and focus on that. — Charlie Munger

We have a passion for keeping things simple. — Charlie Munger

The way to win is to work, work, work, work and hope to have a few insights And you're probably not going to be smart enough to find thousands in a lifetime. And when you get a few, you really load up. It's just that simple. — Charlie Munger

The only way to win is to work, work, work, work, and hope to have a few insights — Charlie Munger

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

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

Charlie Munger Famous Quotes And Sayings

One of the greatest ways to avoid trouble is to keep it simple. — Charlie Munger

You have to know accounting. It's the language of practical business life. It was a very useful thing to deliver to civilization. I've heard it came to civilization through Venice which of course was once the great commercial power in the Mediterranean. However, double entry bookkeeping was a hell of an invention. — Charlie Munger

What do you want to avoid? Such an easy answer: sloth and unreliability. If you're unreliable it doesn't matter what your virtues are. You're going to crater immediately. Doing what you have faithfully engaged to do should be an automatic part of your conduct. You want to avoid sloth and unreliability. — Charlie Munger

Creative accounting is an absolute curse to a civilization. One could argue that double-entry bookkeeping was one of history's great advances. Using accounting for fraud and folly is a disgrace. In a democracy, it often takes a scandal to trigger reform. Enron was the most obvious example of a business culture gone wrong in a long, long time. — Charlie Munger

I got at a very early age, the idea that the safest way to try and get what you want, is to try and deserve what you want. It’s such a simple idea, it’s the golden rule so to speak. You want to deliver to the world what you would buy if you were on the other end. — Charlie Munger

Well the open-outcry auction is just made to turn the brain into mush: you've got social proof, the other guy is bidding, you get reciprocation tendency, you get deprival super-reaction syndrome, the thing is going away... I mean it just absolutely is designed to manipulate people into idiotic behavior. — Charlie Munger

It’s waiting that helps you as an investor, and a lot of people just can’t stand to wait. If you didn’t get the deferred-gratification gene, you’ve got to work very hard to overcome that. — Charlie Munger

People have always had this craving to have someone tell them the future. Long ago, kings would hire people to read sheep guts. There's always been a market for people who pretend to know the future. Listening to today's forecasters is just as crazy as when the king hired the guy to look at the sheep guts. — Charlie Munger

I think it is undeniably true that the human brain must work in models. The trick is to have your brain work better than the other person's brain because it understands the most fundamental models- ones that will do most work per unit. — Charlie Munger

If you skillfully follow the multidisciplinary path, you will never wish to come back. It would be like cutting off your hands. — Charlie Munger

The basic concept of value to a private owner and being motivated when you're buying and selling securities by reference to intrinsic value instead of price momentum - I don't think that will ever be outdated. — Charlie Munger

You need to have a passionate interest in why things are happening. That cast of mind, kept over long periods, gradually improves your ability to focus on reality. If you don't have the cast of mind, you're destined for failure even if you have a high I.Q. — Charlie Munger

Even bright people are going to have limited, really valuable insights in a very competitive world when they're fighting against other very bright, hardworking people. And it makes sense to load up on the very few good insights you have instead of pretending to know everything about everything at all times. — Charlie Munger

You must have the confidence to override people with more credentials than you whose cognition is impaired by incentive-caused bias or some similar psychological force that is obviously present. But there are also cases where you have to recognize that you have no wisdom to add - and that your best course is to trust some expert. — Charlie Munger

In the corporate world, if you have analysts, due diligence, and no horse sense, you've just described hell. — Charlie Munger

How do you compete against a true fanatic? You can only try to build the best possible moat and continuously attempt to widen it. — Charlie Munger

The model I like to sort of simplify the notion of what goes on in a market for common stocks is the pari-mutuel system at the racetrack. If you stop to think about it, a pari-mutuel system is a market. Everybody goes there and bets and the odds change based on what's bet. That's what happens in the stock market. — Charlie Munger

Our experience tends to confirm a long-held notion that being prepared, on a few occasions in a lifetime, to act promptly in scale, in doing some simple and logical thing, will often dramatically improve the financial results of that lifetime. — Charlie Munger

If you buy something because it's undervalued, then you have to think about selling it when it approaches your calculation of its intrinsic value. That's hard. But if you buy a few great companies, then you can sit on your ass. That's a good thing. — Charlie Munger

It's a finite and very competitive world. All large aggregations of capital eventually find it hell on earth to grow and thus find a lower rate of return. — Charlie Munger

To us, investing is the equivalent of going out and betting against the pari-mutuel system. We look for a horse with one chance in two of winning, and that pays three to one. In other words, we're looking for a mispriced gamble. That's what investing is, and you have to know enough to know whether the gamble is mispriced. — Charlie Munger

Remember that reputation and integrity are your most valuable assets - and can be lost in a heartbeat. — Charlie Munger

Bull markets go to people's heads. If you're a duck on a pond, and it's rising due to a downpour, you start going up in the world. But you think it's you, not the pond. — Charlie Munger

I try to get rid of people who always confidently answer questions about which they don't have any real knowledge. — Charlie Munger

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. — Charlie Munger

Here's one truth that perhaps your typical investment counselor would disagree with: if you're comfortably rich and someone else is getting richer faster than you by, for example, investing in risky stocks, so what?! Someone will always be getting richer faster than you. This is not a tragedy. — Charlie Munger

You must force yourself to consider opposing arguments. Especially when they challenge your best loved ideas. — Charlie Munger

Go to bed smarter than when you woke up. — Charlie Munger

If the same family were always on the bottom, then you'd have big resentments. But if DuPonts go down and Pampered Chef up, [that's good]. That much churn makes people think the system is fairer. Buffett: We don't like churn now, but we liked it more 30-40 years ago. — Charlie Munger

Part of [having uncommon sense] is being able to tune out folly, as opposed to recognizing wisdom. If you bat away many things, you don't clutter yourself. — Charlie Munger

If you have competence, you know the edge. It wouldnt be a competence if you didnt know where the boundaries lie. Asking whether youve passed the boundary is a question that almost answers itself. — Charlie Munger

One metric catches people. We prefer businesses that drown in cash. An example of a different business is construction equipment. You work hard all year and there is your profit sitting in the yard. We avoid businesses like that. We prefer those that can write us a check at the end of the year. — Charlie Munger

For some odd reason, I had an early and extreme multidisciplinary cast of mind. I couldn't stand reaching for a small idea in my own discipline when there was a big idea right over the fence in somebody else's discipline. So I just grabbed in all directions for the big ideas that would really work. — Charlie Munger

Just avoid things like racing trains to the crossing, doing cocaine, etc. Develop good mental habits. — Charlie Munger

It's in the nature of stock markets to go way down from time to time. There's no system to avoid bad markets. You can't do it unless you try to time the market, which is a seriously dumb thing to do. Conservative investing with steady savings without expecting miracles is the way to go. — Charlie Munger

...People need to ask, "How do I play the hand that has been dealt me?" The world is not going to give you extra return just because you want it. You have to be very shrewd and hard working to get a little extra. It's so much easier to reduce your wants. There are a lot of smart people and a lot of them cheat, so it's not easy to win. — Charlie Munger

Since those don’t hit financial reports, the opportunities you had but didn’t accept, most people don’t bother thinking about them very much. At least that is a mistake we don’t make. We rub our own noses in our mistakes in blowing opportunities, as we just did. — Charlie Munger

In engineering, people have a big margin of safety. But in the financial world, people don't give a damn about safety. They let it balloon and balloon and balloon. It's aided by false accounting. — Charlie Munger

A business model that relies on trickery is doomed to fail. — Charlie Munger

We're the tortoise that has outrun the hare because it chose the easy predictions. — Charlie Munger

Well, the questioner came from Singapore, which has perhaps the best economic record in the history of developing an economy. And therefore he referred to 15 percent per annum as modest. It's not modest, it's arrogant. — Charlie Munger

Understanding both the power of compound interest and the difficulty of getting it is the heart and soul of understanding a lot of things. — Charlie Munger

Everybody engaged in complex work needs colleagues. Just the discipline of having to put your thoughts in order with somebody else is a very useful thing.” — Charlie Munger

A board member should be perfectly willing to leave at any time and willing to make the tough calls. — Charlie Munger

We have a high moral responsibility to be rational — Charlie Munger

No CEO examining books today understands what the hell is going on. — Charlie Munger

Of course the self-serving bias is something you want to get out of yourself. Thinking that what's good for you is good for the wider civilization and rationalizing all these ridiculous conclusions based on this subconscious tendency to serve one's self is a terribly inaccurate way to think. — Charlie Munger

Using volatility as a measure of risk is nuts. Risk to us is 1) the risk of permanent loss of capital, or 2) the risk of inadequate return. — Charlie Munger

You don't have to be brilliant, only a little bit wiser than the other guys, on average, for a long, long, time. — Charlie Munger

Suppose you were a real estate investor with a 1/3 interest in the best apartment complex in town, the best mall, and the best office building. Would you feel like a poor, undiversified investor? No! But as soon as you get into stocks, people feel this way. Partly, people need to justify their fees. — Charlie Munger

We've got great flexibility and a certain discipline in terms of not doing some foolish thing just to be active - discipline in avoiding just doing any damn thing just because you can't stand inactivity. — Charlie Munger

Berkshire was built on the eternal verities: basic mathematics, basic horse sense, basic fear, and basic diagnosis of human nature to make predictions regarding human behavior. We stuck to the basics with a certain amount of discipline and it has worked out quite well. — Charlie Munger

The total amount paid out in dividends is roughly equal to the amount lost in trading and investment advice, so net dividends to shareholders are zero. This is a very peculiar way to run a republic. — Charlie Munger

To me, it's obvious that the winner has to bet very selectively. It's been obvious to me since very early in life. I don't know why it's not obvious to very many other people. — Charlie Munger

Life Lessons by Charlie Munger

1. Charlie Munger's success is a testament to the power of hard work, discipline, and focus on the long-term. He emphasizes the importance of investing in yourself, learning from mistakes, and being open to new ideas.
2. Charlie Munger's approach to investing is based on a deep understanding of the markets, a focus on value, and a willingness to take calculated risks. He also emphasizes the importance of diversifying investments and avoiding overconfidence.
3. Charlie Munger's success is also a testament to the power of collaboration, as he has worked closely with Warren Buffett for decades to build a successful business empire. He emphasizes the importance of working together to achieve success and the value of having a strong network of advisors.