The best quotes by the author we have brought to you
“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.” (The Intelligent Investor Quotes)
Benjamin Graham
The Intelligent Investor
“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.”
Benjamin Graham
The Intelligent Investor
“A strong-minded approach to investment, firmly based on the margin-of-safety principle, can yield handsome rewards. But a decision to try for these emoluments rather than for the assured fruits of defensive investment should not be made without much self-examination.”
Benjamin Graham
The Intelligent Investor
“After all, the whole point of investing is not to earn more money than average, but to earn enough money to meet your own needs.”
Benjamin Graham
The Intelligent Investor
“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”
Benjamin Graham
The Intelligent Investor
“An elementary requirement for the intelligent investor is an ability to resist the blandishments of salesmen offering new common-stock issues during bull markets.”
Benjamin Graham
The Intelligent Investor
“An investment operation is one which, upon thorough analysis promises safety of principal and an adequate return. Operations not meeting these requirements are speculative.”
Benjamin Graham
The Intelligent Investor
“An investment operation is one which, upon thorough analysis, promises safety of principal and an adequate return. Operations not meeting these requirements are speculative.”
Benjamin Graham
The Intelligent Investor
“As the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard noted, life can only be understood backwards—but it must be lived forwards.”
Benjamin Graham
The Intelligent Investor
“Be sure to compare the footnotes with those in the financial statements of at least one firm that’s a close competitor, to see how aggressive your company’s accountants are.”
Benjamin Graham
The Intelligent Investor
“But investing isn’t about beating others at their game. It’s about controlling yourself at your own game.”
Benjamin Graham
The Intelligent Investor
“Financial scholars have been studying mutual-fund performance for at least a half century, and they are virtually unanimous on several points: the average fund does not pick stocks well enough to overcome its costs of researching and trading them; the higher a fund’s expenses, the lower its returns; the more frequently a fund trades its stocks, the less it tends to earn; highly volatile funds, which bounce up and down more than average, are likely to stay volatile; funds with high past returns are unlikely to remain winners for long.”
Benjamin Graham
The Intelligent Investor
“Graham urges you to invest only if you would be comfortable owning a stock even if you had no way of knowing its daily share price.”
Benjamin Graham
The Intelligent Investor
“If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”
Benjamin Graham
The Intelligent Investor
“If you want to put money in investment funds, buy a group of closed-end shares at a discount of, say, 10% to 15% from asset value, instead of paying a premium of about 9% above asset value for shares of an open-end company. Assuming that the future dividends and changes in asset values continue to be about the same for the two groups, you will thus obtain about one-fifth more for your money from the closed-end shares.”
Benjamin Graham
The Intelligent Investor
“Intelligence has nothing to do with IQ or SAT scores. It simply means being patient, disciplined, and eager to learn.”
Benjamin Graham
The Intelligent Investor
“It is no difficult trick to bring a great deal of energy, study, and native ability into Wall Street and to end up with losses instead of profits. These virtues, if channeled in the wrong directions, become indistinguishable from handicaps.”
Benjamin Graham
The Intelligent Investor
“It is our argument that a sufficiently low price can turn a security of mediocre quality into a sound investment opportunity—provided that the buyer is informed and experienced and that he practices adequate diversification. For, if the price is low enough to create a substantial margin of safety, the security thereby meets our criterion of investment”
Benjamin Graham
The Intelligent Investor
“It is the mark of an educated mind to expect that amount of exactness which the nature of the particular subject admits. It is equally unreasonable to accept merely probable conclusions from a mathematician and to demand strict demonstration from an orator.”
Benjamin Graham
The Intelligent Investor
“It requires a great deal of boldness and a great deal of caution to make a great fortune; and when you have got it, it requires ten times as much wit to keep it. —Nathan Mayer Rothschild”
Benjamin Graham
The Intelligent Investor
“Never mingle your speculative and investment operations in the same account, nor in any part of your thinking.”
Benjamin Graham
The Intelligent Investor
“Obvious prospects for physical growth in a business do not translate into obvious profits for investors.”
Benjamin Graham
The Intelligent Investor
“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.”
Benjamin Graham
The Intelligent Investor
“People who invest make money for themselves; people who speculate make money for their brokers.”
Benjamin Graham
The Intelligent Investor
“Since the profits that companies can earn are finite, the price that investors should be willing to pay for stocks must also be finite.”
Benjamin Graham
The Intelligent Investor
“The best way to measure your investing success is not by whether you’re beating the market but by whether you’ve put in place a financial plan and a behavioral discipline that are likely to get you where you want to go. In the end, what matters isn’t crossing the finish line before anybody else but just making sure that you do cross it.”
Benjamin Graham
The Intelligent Investor
“The intelligent investor dreads a bull market, since it makes stocks more costly to buy.”
Benjamin Graham
The Intelligent Investor
“The intelligent investor is a realist who sells to optimists and buys from pessimists.”
Benjamin Graham
The Intelligent Investor
“The investment world nevertheless has enough liars, cheaters, and thieves to keep Satan’s check-in clerks frantically busy for decades to come.”
Benjamin Graham
The Intelligent Investor
“The market is a pendulum that forever swings between unsustainable optimism (which makes stocks too expensive) and unjustified pessimism (which makes them too cheap). The Intelligent Investor is a realist who sells to optimists and buys from pessimists.”
Benjamin Graham
The Intelligent Investor
“The most dangerous untruths are truths slightly distorted. —G. C. Lichtenberg”
Benjamin Graham
The Intelligent Investor
“The most realistic distinction between the investor and the speculator is found in their attitude toward stock-market movements. The speculator’s primary interest lies in anticipating and profiting from market fluctuations. The investor’s primary interest lies in acquiring and holding suitable securities at suitable prices. Market movements are important to him in a practical sense, because they alternately create low price levels at which he would be wise to buy and high price levels at which he certainly should refrain from buying and probably would be wise to sell.”
Benjamin Graham
The Intelligent Investor
“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.”
Benjamin Graham
The Intelligent Investor
“The punches you miss are the ones that wear you out. —Boxing trainer Angelo Dundee”
Benjamin Graham
The Intelligent Investor
“The readers to buy their stocks as they bought their groceries, not as they bought their perfume.”
Benjamin Graham
The Intelligent Investor
“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.”
Benjamin Graham
The Intelligent Investor
“Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Benjamin Graham
The Intelligent Investor
“We added that the stock component should carry a fair degree of protection against a loss of purchasing power caused by large-scale inflation.”
Benjamin Graham
The Intelligent Investor
“We recommended that the investor divide his holdings between high-grade bonds and leading common stocks; that the proportion held in bonds be never less than 25% or more than 75%, with the converse being necessarily true for the common-stock component; that his simplest choice would be to maintain a 50–50 proportion between the two, with adjustments to restore the equality when market developments had disturbed it by as much as, say, 5%.”
Benjamin Graham
The Intelligent Investor
“What’s needed is a sound intellectual framework for making decisions and the ability to keep emotions from corroding that framework.”
Benjamin Graham
The Intelligent Investor
“While it seems easy to foresee which industry will grow the fastest, that foresight has no real value if most other investors are already expecting the same thing.”
Benjamin Graham
The Intelligent Investor
“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.”
Benjamin Graham
The Intelligent Investor
“Without a saving faith in the future, no one would ever invest at all.”
Benjamin Graham
The Intelligent Investor
“You must thoroughly analyze a company, and the soundness of its underlying businesses, before you buy its stock; And you must deliberately protect yourself against serious losses; you must aspire to “adequate,” not extraordinary, performance.”
Benjamin Graham
The Intelligent Investor
“You will be much more in control, if you realize how much you are not in control.”
Benjamin Graham
The Intelligent Investor
