Here are some of my favorite quotes, clubbed loosely by category:

 

On Investing

“Price is what you pay. Value is what you get” — Warren Buffett

“Risk comes from not knowing what you’re doing” — Warren Buffett

“I never attempt to make money on the stock market. I buy on the assumption that you could close the market the next day and not reopen it for five years” — Warren Buffett

“We simply attempt to be fearful when others are greedy and to be greedy only when others are fearful” — Warren Buffett

“A high-quality asset can constitute a good or bad buy, and a low-quality asset can constitute a good or bad buy. The tendency to mistake objective merit for investment opportunity, and the failure to distinguish between good assets and good buys, get most investors in trouble.” — Howard Marks (The Most Important Thing: Uncommon Sense for the Thoughtful Investor)

“The first things is character…before money or anything else. Money cannot buy it…A man I do not trust could not get money from me on all the bonds in Christendom. I think that is the fundamental basis of business” —  J.P. Morgan

 

On Entrepreneurship

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” — Steve Jobs

“Doing, not learning to do, is the essence of entrepreneurship.” — Guy Kawasaki (The Art of the Start)

“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” — Thomas Edison

“Organizations are successful because of good implementation,not good business plans.” — Guy Kawasaki

“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to always tell the difference.” — Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhourse-Five)

“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”  — Bill Gates

“If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans” — Woody Allen

“Money is like gasoline on a road trip. You don’t want to run out, but you’re not doing a tour of gas stations.” — Tim O’Reilly

“If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late” — Reid Hoffman

 

On Selling/Execution

“ABC: Always Be Closing” — Popularized by the film Glengarry Glen Ross

 

On Fairness/Certainty/Work Ethic

“Rise Early, Work Hard, Strike Oil” —John Paul Getty

“Carpe Diem (translated loosely as Sieze the Day)” — Horace

 

On Randomness, Luck & The Human Mind

“Heroes are heroes because they are heroic in behavior, not because they won or lost” — Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Fooled by Randomness)

“The correctness of a decision can’t be judged from the outcome. Nevertheless, that’s how people assess it. A good decision is one that’s optimal at the time it’s made, when the future is by definition unknown. Thus, correct decisions are often unsuccessful, and vice versa.” — Howard Marks (The Most Important Thing: Uncommon Sense for the Thoughtful Investor)

“The inability to predict outliers implies the inability to predict the course of history” — Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Black Swan)

“The idea that the future is unpredictable is undermined every day by the ease with which the past is explained.” — Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow)

“Luck is the grand equalizer.” — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“We favor the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated, and the tangible; we scorn the abstract.” — Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Fooled by Randomness)

“Ideas come and go, stories stay” — Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Black Swan)

“What should we control? As a rule, intervening to limit size (of companies, airports, or sources of pollution), concentration, and speed are beneficial in reducing Black Swan risks.” — Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Antifragile)

“Increasingly, data can only truly deliver via negativa–style knowledge—it can be effectively used to debunk, not confirm.” — Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Antifragile)

“The problem with experts is that they do not know what they do not know” — Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Black Swan)

“In the complex world, the notion of “cause” itself is suspect; it is either nearly impossible to detect or not really defined—another reason to ignore newspapers, with their constant supply of causes for things.” — Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Antifragile)

“We are prone to overestimate how much we understand about the world and to underestimate the role of chance in events.” — Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow)

“We focus on our goal, anchor on our plan, and neglect relevant base rates, exposing ourselves to the planning fallacy. We focus on what we want to do and can do, neglecting the plans and skills of others. Both in explaining the past and in predicting the future, we focus on the causal role of skill and neglect the role of luck. We are therefore prone to an illusion of control. We focus on what we know and neglect what we do not know, which makes us overly confident in our beliefs.” — Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow)

 

 

On Probability/Risk/Cognitive Errors

“Doctors most commonly get mixed up between absence of evidence and evidence of absence” — Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Fooled by Randomness)

“Probability is not a mere computation of odds on the dice or more complicated variants; it is the acceptance of the lack of certainty in our knowledge and the development of methods for dealing with our ignorance.” — Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Fooled by Randomness)

“This is the essence of intuitive heuristics: when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.” — Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow)

“We are prone to blame decision makers for good decisions that worked out badly and to give them too little credit for successful moves that appear obvious only after the fact.” — Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow)

“Remember this rule: intuition cannot be trusted in the absence of stable regularities in the environment.” — Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow)

“I won’t bet because I would feel the $100 loss more than the $200 gain. But I’ll take you on if you promise to let me make 100 such bets.” — Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow)

“There is always risk, so learn to manage risk instead of avoiding it.” — Robert Kiyosaki (Rich Dad, Poor Dad)

 

On Dishonesty

“The more cashless our society becomes, the more our moral compass slips.” — Dan Ariely (The Honest Truth About Dishonesty)

 

Miscellaneous

“Science is magic that works.” — Kurt Vonnegut (Cat’s Cradle)

“So it goes” — Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhourse-Five)

“Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose” — Janis Joplin

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be” — Kurt Vonnegut