I taught myself how to breathe slower. How to slow things down. How to not answer somebody instantaneously. You can always move slower. The world will basically wait for you if you’re deciding something consequential. And you can always say, “I’d like to think about that a little bit.” So the only reason to feel panicked is if you’re panicking yourself, and that’s your fault. You don’t have to do that. You can take your time, you can weigh things. It’s very infrequently that the timing has to be instantaneous.

– Stephen Schwarzman

Steve had told me back in 1998 that the only reason for companies to exist was to build products; he was now using his company to build more than just products. Apple was now creating a holistic customer experience.

– Brent Schlender & Rick Tetzeli, Becoming Steve Jobs

Risk is what’s left over after you think you’ve thought of everything.

– Carl Richards

What an astonishing thing a book is. One glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person — maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.

– Carl Sagan

In the financial markets, there is rarely anything new under the sun, but you can never say you’ve seen it all, and what you thought you would never see can clobber you.

– Seth Klarman

If you don’t follow the pendulum and understand the cycle, then that implies that you always invest as much money as aggressively. That doesn’t make any sense to me. I have been around too long to think that a good investment is always equally good all the time regardless of the climate.

– Howard Marks

The horse to bet on is the one more likely to win than most people expect. That’s the one that gives you the best odds. That’s the bet that pays off over time.

– Steven Crist

The biggest mistake investors make is to believe that what happened in the recent past is likely to persist.

– Howard Marks

However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. Love your life, poor as it is.

– Henry David Thoreau