Quotes from Benjamin Graham

The stock investor is neither right or wrong because others agreed or disagreed with him; he is right because his facts and analysis are right.

People who invest make money for themselves; people who speculate make money for their brokers.

As the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard noted, life can only be understood backwards—but it must be lived forwards.

The punches you miss are the ones that wear you out. —Boxing trainer Angelo Dundee

You will be much more in control, if you realize how much you are not in control.

invest only if you would be comfortable owning a stock even if you had no way of knowing its daily share price.3

Americans are getting stronger. Twenty years ago, it took two people to carry ten dollars' worth of groceries. Today, a five-year-old can do it. —Henny Youngman

plant trees that other men will sit under.

Buy cheap and sell dear.

you must thoroughly analyze a company, and the soundness of its underlying businesses, before you buy its stock; you must deliberately protect yourself against serious losses; you must aspire to "adequate," not extraordinary, performance.

A cynic once told G. K. Chesterton, the British novelist and essayist, "Blessed is he who expecteth nothing, for he shall not be disappointed." Chesterton's rejoinder? "Blessed is he who expecteth nothing, for he shall enjoy everything.

On the other hand, investing is a unique kind of casino—one where you cannot lose in the end, so long as you play only by the rules that put the odds squarely in your favor.

A stock is not just a ticker symbol or an electronic blip; it is an ownership interest in an actual business, with an underlying value that does not depend on its share price.

If the reason people invest is to make money, then in seeking advice they are asking others to tell them how to make money. That idea has some element of naïveté.

The psychologists Daniel Kahnerman and Amos Tversky have shown when humans estimate the likelihood or frequency of an event, we make that judgment based not on how often the event has actually occurred, but on how vivid the past examples are.

Abnormally good or abnormally bad conditions do not last forever.

The schoolteacher asks Billy Bob: "If you have 12 sheeps and one jumps over the fence, how many sheeps do you have left?" Billy Bob answers, "None." "Well" says the teacher, "you sure don't know your subtraction." "Maybe not," Billy Bob replies, "but i darn sure know my sheeps.

All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.

The intelligent investor realizes that stocks become more risky, not less, as their prices rise—and less risky, not more, as their prices fall. The intelligent investor dreads a bull market, since it makes stocks more costly to buy. And conversely (so long as you keep enough cash on hand to meet your spending needs), you should welcome a bear market, since it puts stocks back on sale. 8

while enthusiasm may be necessary for great accomplishments elsewhere, on Wall Street it almost invariably leads to disaster.

In other words, the market is not a weighing machine, on which the value of each issue is recorded by an exact and impersonal mechanism, in accordance with its specific qualities. Rather should we say that the market is a voting machine, whereon countless individuals register choices which are the product partly of reason and partly of emotion.

An investment operation is one which, upon thorough analysis promises safety of principal and an adequate return. Operations not meeting these requirements are speculative.

With every new wave of optimism or pessimism, we are ready to abandon history and time-tested principles, but we cling tenaciously and unquestioningly to our prejudices.    

You've got to be careful if you don't know where you're going, 'cause you might not get there. —Yogi Berra