Echoes

Though business conditions may change, corporations and securities may change, and financial institutions and regulations may change, human nature remains the same. Thus the important and difficult part of sound investment, which hinges upon the investor's own temperament and attitude, is not much affected by the passing years.

Basically, price fluctuations have only one significant meaning for the true investor. They provide him with an opportunity to buy wisely when prices fall sharply and to sell wisely when they advance a great deal. At other times he will do better if he forgets about the stock market and pays attention to his dividend returns and to the operating results of his companies.

All the real money in investment will have to be made—as most of it has been in the past— not out of buying and selling but out of owning and holding securities, receiving interests and dividends therein, and benefiting from their long-term increases in value. Hence stockholder's major energies and wisdom as investors should be directed toward assuring themselves of the best operating results from their corporations. This in turn means assuring themselves of fully honest and competent managements.

You have power over your mind — not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.

The investor's chief problem — and even his worst enemy — is likely to be himself.

Investment is most intelligent when it is most businesslike.

I am more and more convinced that our happiness or unhappiness depends far more on the way we meet the events of life than on the nature of those events themselves.

The individual investor should act consistently as an investor and not as a speculator.

The way to wealth is as plain as the way to market. It depends chiefly on two words: industry and frugality — that is, waste neither time nor money, but make the best use of both.

External things are not the problem. It's your assessment of them. Which you can erase right now.

If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything, it is open to everything.

All that a man achieves and all that he fails to achieve is the direct result of his own thoughts.

Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.

What I urge is that you so learn to control the machinery as to live with 'day-tight compartments' as the most certain way to ensure safety on the voyage. Touch a button and hear, at every level of your life, the iron doors shutting out the dead yesterdays and the unborn to-morrows.

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.

Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.

In the short run, the market is a voting machine, but in the long run, it is a weighing machine.

In the words of the ancients, one should make his decisions within the space of seven breaths. It is a matter of being determined and having the spirit to break right through to the other side.

The present moment contains past and future. The secret of transformation, is in the way we handle this very moment.

The man of virtue makes the difficulty to be overcome his first business, and success only a subsequent consideration.

In a word, neither death, nor exile, nor pain, nor anything of this kind is the real cause of our doing or not doing any action, but our inward opinions and principles.

How easy it is to repel and to wipe away every impression which is troublesome or unsuitable, and immediately to be in all tranquility.

They can, because they think they can.

He who remembers the evils he has undergone, and those that have threatened him, and the slight causes that have changed him from one state to another, prepares himself in that way for future changes and for recognizing his condition. The life of Caesar has no more to show us than our own; an emperor's or an ordinary man's, it is still a life subject to all human accidents.

One special advantage of the skeptical attitude of mind is that a man is never vexed to find that after all he has been in the wrong.