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In most cases, your reasons have very little to do with why you believe what you believe. The reasons are a story that come to your mind when you need to explain yourself.

– Daniel Kahneman

Playing the long game is following the road less travelled by turning down what feels good now in favor of what we think will set us up for feeling awesome later on. We need to put up with criticism from those who are playing the short game and will tell us we’re boring or wasting our time.

– Joseph Henrich

Superior investment performance is not our primary goal. But superior performance with less-than commensurate risk above average gains in good times are not proof of a manager’s skill. It takes superior performance in bad times to prove that those good-time gains were earned through skill, not simply the acceptance of above average risk.

– Howard Marks

I don’t believe in valuations. I follow a migrationary path for the companies I invest in. We must be able to visualize the future. Take Gillette for example. Twin blades constitute mere 10% of the Indian marke. Bangladesh has 33% penetration. If India catches up with Bangladesh, Gillette will be a Rs 15,000 crore company having a net profit of Rs 2200 crores. At 40 times discounting, that’s Rs 27,000 per share. That is the migration path that a valuation cannot show In 1979, Hindustan Lever was a Rs 140 crore company. In 2013, its sales were Rs 27,000 crore. Again, only a migrationary thought process would have shown that and not valuation.

– Chandrakant Sampat

The fact that your mind cannot retain and use everything you know at once is the cause of such biases. One central aspect of a heuristic is that it is blind to reasoning.

– Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I think that the most important investment you can make is in yourself. Very, very, very few people get anything like their potential horsepower translated into the actual horsepower of their output in life. Potential exceeds realization to just an enormous factor with so many people…. Your best asset is your own self. And you can become, to an enormous degree, the person you want to be.

– Warren Buffett

There are only two ways of learning to ride a fractious horse; one is to get on him and learn by actual practice how each motion and trick may be best met; the other is to sit on a fence and watch the beast awhile, and then retire to the house and at leisure figure out the best way of overcoming his jumps and kicks. The latter system is the safer, but the former, on the whole, turns out the larger proportion of good riders. It is very much the same in learning to ride a flying machine; if you are looking for perfect safety you will do well to sit on a fence and watch the birds, but if you really wish to learn you must mount a machine and become acquainted with its tricks by actual trial.

– Wilbur Wright

We could make a lot of decisions about a lot of things very fast and very easily. And we’re unusual in that respect. And the reason we’re able to do that is there’s such an enormous other lot of things that we won’t allow ourselves to think about at all. It’s just that simple. I have a little phrase when people make pitches to me, and about halfway through the first sentence, I say, ‘We don’t do startups.’ They don’t exist. Well, if you blot out startups, there’s a whole layer of complexity that goes out of your life. And we’ve got other little blotter-out systems. And using those, we finally find out that what remains is still a pretty large territory that we can handle.

– Charlie Munger

Volatility is not a measure of risk…. Risk comes from the nature of certain kinds of businesses. It can be risky to be in some businesses just by the simple economics of the type of business you’re in, and it comes from not knowing what you’re doing. And if you understand the economics of the business in which you are engaged, and you know the people with whom you’re doing business, and you know the price you pay is sensible, you don’t run any real risk.

– Warren Buffett