Poor Charlie's Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger, Expanded Third Edition

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?

That sounds funny, making friends among 'the eminent dead,' but if you go through life making friends with the eminent dead who had the right ideas, I think it will work better for you in life and work better in education. It's way better than just giving the basic concepts.

When I was younger, the major accounting firms were quite ethical places, and nobody got filthy rich. But in the space of twenty-five years, they sold out to terrible behavior, one little step at a time.

Just avoid things like AIDS situations, racing trains to the crossing, and doing cocaine.

[It's] a funny business because on a net basis, the whole investment management business together gives no value added to all buyers combined. That's the way it has to work.

However, all man's desired geometric progressions, if a high rate of growth is chosen, at last come to grief on a finite earth.

I would have to say that Charlie is not looking for anyone to have an effect on him, but that Nancy has done a remarkable job in spite of that fact.

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.

modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

don't believe that psychology professors in America are people whose alternative career paths were in the toughest part of physics. And that may be one of the reasons why they don't get it quite right.

I notice that when all a man’s information is confined to the field in which he is working, the work is never as good as it ought to be. A man has to get perspective, and he can get it from bools or from people-preferably from both.

There is no better teacher than history in determining the future.... There are answers worth billions of dollars in a $30 history book.

In the last analysis, every profession is a conspiracy against the laity.

You'll better understand the evil of top audit firms starting to sell fraudulent tax shelters when I tell you that one told me that they're better [than the others] because they only sold [the schemes] to their top twenty clients, so no one would notice.

capitalism without failure is like religion without hell.

Charlie marches to his own music, and it's music like virtually no one else is listening to.

work providing much more value to others.

understood and respected the value of one's word.

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.

In investing, just as in baseball, to put runs on the scoreboard, one must watch the playing field, not the scoreboard.

You don't need to take the last dollar" and "Choose clients as you would choose friends.

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

If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember your lies.

Still, the special strength of extra-vivid images in influencing the mind can be constructively used (1) in persuading someone else to reach a correct conclusion or (2) as a device for improving one's own memory by attaching vivid images, one after the other, to many items one doesn't want to forget. Indeed, such use of vivid images as memory boosters is what enabled the great orators of classical Greece and Rome to give such long, organized speeches without using notes.

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.