Quotes from Peter Lynch

In this business if you're good, you're right six times out of ten. You're never going to be right nine times out of ten.

I don't go near the money and the money doesn't go near me.

Never invest in any idea you can't illustrate with a crayon.

I deal in facts, not forecasting the future. That's crystal ball stuff. That doesn't work.

All you need for a lifetime of successful investing is a few big winners, and the pluses from those will overwhelm the minuses from the stocks that don't work out.

Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. Suicide is a choice and I think if we work with that with kids, we'll get somewhere.

Go for a business that any idiot can run - because sooner or later, any idiot probably is going to run it.

In business, competition is never as healthy as total domination.

Twenty years in this business convinces me that any normal person using the customary three percent of the brain can pick stocks just as well, if not better, than the average Wall Street expert.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, in business, so is a number.

Imagine if you borrowed your parents' car without permission and ran it into a tree, how much better you'd feel if you were incorporated.

A technique that works repeatedly is to wait until the prevailing opinion about a certain industry is that things have gone from bad to worse, and then buy shares in the strongest companies in the group.

In stage four, once again they're crowded around me—but this time it's to tell me what stocks I should buy. Even the dentist has three or four tips, and in the next few days I look up his recommendations in the newspaper and they've all gone up. When the neighbors tell me what to buy and then I wish I had taken their advice, it's a sure sign that the market has reached a top and is due for a tumble.

While catching up on the news is merely depressing to the citizen who has no stocks, it is a dangerous habit for the investor.

If the p/e of Coca-Cola is 15, you'd expect the company to be growing at about 15 percent a year, etc. But if the p/e ratio is less than the growth rate, you may have found yourself a bargain. A company, say, with a growth rate of 12 percent a year (also known as a "12-percent grower") and a p/e ratio of 6 is a very attractive prospect.

Primes are the atoms of the number system: every whole number is a product of primes.

You have to keep your priorities straight, if you plan to do well in stocks.

My diaries are full of such missed opportunities, but the stock market is merciful—it always gives the nincompoop a second chance.

The best way to handle a situation in which you love the company but not the current price is to make a small commitment and then increase it in the next sell-off.

If my favorite Internet company sells for $30 a share, and yours sells for $10, then people who focus on price would say that mine is the superior company. This is a dangerous delusion. What Mr. Market pays for a stock today or next week doesn't tell you which company has the best chance to succeed two to three years down the information superhighway.

Most individual investors would be better off in an index mutual fund.

Investing without research is like playing stud poker and never looking at the cards. For some reason the whole business

more than eight hundred thousand Americans file for personal bankruptcy every year.

Ultimately it is not the stock market nor even the companies themselves that determine an investor's fate. It is the investor.