The disadvantage of a mindset is that it can color and control our perception to the extent that an experienced specialist may be among the last to see what is really happening when events take a new and unexpected turn. When faced with a major paradigm shift, analysts who know the most about a subject have the most to unlearn. This seems to have happened before the reunification of Germany, for example. Some German specialists had to be prodded by their more generalist supervisors to accept the significance of the dramatic changes in progress toward reunification of East and West Germany.

– Richards Heuer

As a young analyst, I always started by looking for really cheap stocks, and after concluding they were indeed underpriced, I then tried to convince myself that neither the businesses nor managements were bad enough to offset the statistical cheapness.

Having completed all the valuation work before even meeting the maragement, you can guess how strongly biased I was to conclude that they were at least acceptable! Today, I encourage our analysts to reverse that process: Find businesses and managements they’d be excited to own and then do the wark to see if the valuation is attractive.

If it isn’t attractive now, monitor the stock price so you are prepared to act when it is more attractive. It is really amazing to see over the course of our holding period, typically five to seven years, how much value a great maragement can add that never was incorporated in our model, and conversely, how much value a bad management can destroy.

– Bill Nygren

Almost all the parts of our bodies require some expense. The feet demand shoes, the legs stockings, the rest of the body clothing, and the belly a good deal of victuals. Our eyes, though exceedingly useful, ask when reasonable, only the cheap assistance of spectacles, which could not much impair our finances. But the eyes of other people are the eyes that ruin us.

– Benjamin Franklin

Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn’t know the first thing about either.

– Marshall McLuhan

A universal law of economics says the moment something becomes free and ubiquitous, its position in the economic equation suddenly inverts. When nighttime electrical lighting was new and scarce, it was the poor who burned common candles. Later, when electricity became easily accessible and practically free, our preference flipped and candles at dinner became a sign of luxury.

– Kevin Kelly

Success traps can be harder to get out of, because at least with failure traps, there’s incentives to change things. With success traps, the incentives are to keep doing the same thing.

– Greg McKeown

My own experience of how little this knowledge has changed the quality of my own judgment can be sobering. Avoiding noise in judgment is not really something individuals are going to be very good at.

– Danny Kahneman

Fatigue makes cowards of us all.

– Vince Lombardi

When I look back on my life nowadays, which I sometimes do, what strikes me most forcibly about it is that what seemed at the time most significant and seductive, seems now most futile and absurd. For instance, success in all of its various guises; being known and being praised; ostensible pleasures, like acquiring money or seducing women, or traveling, going to and fro in the world and up and down in it like Satan, explaining and experiencing whatever Vanity Fair has to offer. In retrospect, all these exercises in self-gratification seem pure fantasy, what Pascal called, “licking the earth.”

– Malcolm Muggeridge