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You can turn any investment into a bad deal by paying too much. What you can’t do is turn something into a good deal by paying little.

– Warren Buffett

No person has the power to have everything they want, but it is in their power not to want what they don’t have, and to cheerfully put to good use what they do have.

– Seneca

It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science.

– Richard Feynman

If you’re going to do anything new or different in the world, it is going to be misunderstood. Sometimes by well-meaning critics. Sometimes by self-interested critics. You’ll get all kinds. And it’s okay. It’s all part of the process. The only way to avoid criticism altogether is to be completely conventional in everything you do. So how do you respond the the criticism?… What’s the right thing to do? Well, I think the first thing you do is you ask: Are the critics right? You listen. You ask are they right? Or even if they’re not completely right, is there some piece of it that’s right that you can be inspired by? And then if you decide, by the way, that the answer is no—that you believe you have conviction that what you’re doing is the right course—then no force in the world should be able to move you. You should have a deep keel. But if you decide that there is something, then you should change.

-Jeff Bezos

We buy things with what we call a hard catalyst; so some kind of event that’s going to close the gap between what you bought it at and what it’s worth.

We also buy things where there’s no catalyst; so we’re just owning businesses.

In the first category, if there’s a catalyst, we don’t need that much growth. We need to buy it cheap and get out.

In the second category, where there’s no catalyst, we absolutely need growth. And now the growth can come in all kinds of ways. It doesn’t have to come through increased revenues, although a lot of times it does. It can come from running operations more efficiently. It can come from acquisitions. It can come from buying back shares really cheap. But if there’s no catalyst, we absolutely need growth.

– David Abrams

Fanaticism consists of redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.

– George Santayana

‘It is only half and hour’ – ‘It is only an afternoon’ – ‘It is only an evening,’ people say to me over and over again; but they don’t know that it is impossible to command one’s self sometimes to any stipulated and set disposal of five minutes–or that the mere consciousness of an engagement will sometimes worry a whole day…whoever is devoted to an art must be content to deliver himself wholly up to it, and to find recompense in it. I am grieved if you suspect me of not wanting to see you, but I can’t help it; I must go in my way whether or no.

– Charles Dickens

To begin you must study the end. You don’t want to be the first to act, you want to be the last man standing.

-José Raúl Capablanca

Frequently, you’ll look at a business having fabulous results. And the question is how long can this continue? Well, there is only one way to answer that. And that’s to think about why the results are occurring now and then to figure out what could cause those results to stop occurring.

– Charlie Munger