This post features the best Charlie Munger quotes I found during my deep dive into Munger’s words of wisdom.
Post Contents: Click a link here to jump to a section below
- Quotes on Life
- Quotes on Passion
- Quotes on Ideology
- Quotes on Worldly Wisdom
- Quotes on Lifelong Learning
- Quotes on Multidisciplinary Thinking
- Quotes on Mental Models
25+ Charlie Munger Quotes to Live a Wise & Wealthy Life
Charlie Munger Quotes on Life:
“Life and its various passages can be hard, brutally hard. The three things I have found helpful in coping with its challenges are: Have low expectations. Have a sense of humor. Surround yourself with the love of friends and family.”
“The safest way to try to get what you want is to try to deserve what you want. It’s such a simple idea. It’s the golden rule.”
“(To win in) the game of life, get the needed models into your head and think it through forward and backward.”
“I did not succeed in life by intelligence. I succeeded because I have a long attention span.”
“Above all, live with change and adapt to it.”
Charlie Munger Quotes on Passion:
“Intense interest in any subject is indispensable if you’re really going to excel in it. I could force myself to be fairly good in a lot of things, but I couldn’t excel in anything in which I didn’t have an intense interest.”
“You need to have a passionate interest in why things are happening. That cast of mind, kept over long periods, gradually improves your ability to focus on reality.”
“I’m passionate about wisdom. I’m passionate about accuracy and some kinds of curiosity. Perhaps I have some streak of generosity in my nature and a desire to serve values that transcend my brief life. But maybe I’m just here to show off. Who knows?”
“We have a passion for keeping things simple.”
Charlie Munger Quotes on Ideology:
“If you want to end up wise, heavy ideology is very likely to prevent that outcome.”
“You want to be very careful with intense ideology. It presents a big danger for the only mind you’re ever going to have.”
“It is important not to put one’s brain in chains before one has come anywhere near his full potentiality as a rational person.”
“I sought good judgment mostly by collecting instances of bad judgment, then pondering ways to avoid such outcomes.”
“I have what I call an ‘iron prescription’ that helps me keep sane when I drift toward preferring one intense ideology over another. I feel that I’m not entitled to have an opinion unless I can state the arguments against my position better than the people who are in opposition. I think that I am qualified to speak only when I’ve reached that state.”
Charlie Munger Quotes on Worldly Wisdom:
“Acquire worldly wisdom and adjust your behavior accordingly. If your new behavior gives you a little temporary unpopularity with your peer group … then to hell with them.”
“I think it’s a huge mistake not to absorb elementary worldly wisdom if you’re capable of doing it because it makes you better able to serve others, it makes you better able to serve yourself, and it makes life more fun.”
“The curious are provided with much fun and wisdom long after formal education has ended.”
“In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn’t read all the time—none, zero.”
“If it’s wisdom you are after, you are going to spend a lot of time sitting on your ass and reading.”
“The acquisition of wisdom is a moral duty. It’s not something you do just to advance in life. And there’s a corollary to that idea that is very important. It requires that you’re hooked on lifetime learning.”
Charlie Munger Quotes on Lifelong Learning:
“I constantly see people rise in life who are not the smartest, sometimes not even the most diligent. But they are learning machines. They go to bed every night a little wiser than they were that morning.”
“You don’t have to be brilliant, only a little bit wiser than the other guys, on average, for a long, long time.”
“I believe in the discipline of mastering the best that other people have ever figured out. I don’t believe in just sitting down and trying to dream it all up yourself. Nobody’s that smart.”
“If you go through life making friends with the eminent dead who had the right ideas, I think it will work better for you in life and work better in education.”
“There is no better teacher than history in determining the future … There are answers worth billions of dollars in a $30 history book.”
“Just as civilization can progress only when it invents the method of invention, you can progress only when you learn the method of learning.”
“The more basic knowledge you have, the less new knowledge you have to get.”
“The best thing a human being can do is to help another human being know more.”
“Properly done, if teaching isn’t the highest calling of man, it is near it.”
Charlie Munger Quotes on Multidisciplinary Thinking:
“When I urge a multidisciplinary approach—that you’ve got to have the main models from a broad array of disciplines and you’ve got to use them all—I’m really asking you to ignore jurisdictional boundaries. And the world isn’t organized that way … If you want to be a good thinker, you must develop a mind that can jump the jurisdictional boundaries.”
“I could already see that real-world problems didn’t neatly lie within territorial boundaries. They jumped right across. And I was dubious of any approach that, when two things were inextricably intertwined and interconnected, would try and think about one thing but not the other.”
“A multidisciplinary attitude is required if maturity is to be effective … You have to learn many things in such a way that they’re in a mental latticework in your head and you automatically use them the rest of your life.”
“You must know the big ideas in the big disciplines and use them routinely—aIl of them, not just a few.”
“Only an interdisciplinary approach will correctly deal with reality.”
“People take four courses in economics, go to business school, have all these I.Q. points, and write all these essays, but they can’t synthesize worth a damn.”
“If you skillfully follow the multidisciplinary path, you will never wish to come back. It would be like cutting off your hands.”
Charlie Munger Quotes on Mental Models:
“The best question is, ‘Is there anything I can do to make my whole life and my whole mental process work better?’ And I would say that developing the habit of mastering the multiple models which underlie reality is the best thing you can do.”
“What you need is a latticework of mental models in your head. And, with that system, things gradually get to fit together in a way that enhances cognition.”
“You’ve got to array your experience—both vicarious and direct—on this latticework of models. You may have noticed students who just try to remember and pound back what is remembered. Well, they fail in school and fail in life.”
“The first rule is that you’ve got to have multiple models—because if you have just one or two that you’re using, the nature of human psychology is such that you’ll torture reality so that it fits your models, or at least you’ll think it does.”
“The models have to come from multiple disciplines—because all the wisdom of the world is not to be found in one little academic department.”
“You need the best 100 or so models from microeconomics, physiology, psychology particularly, elementary mathematics, hard science and engineering … All you’ve got to do is take the really big ideas and learn them early and well.”
“Eighty or ninety important models will carry about ninety percent of the freight in making you a worldly-wise person. And, of those, only a mere handful really carry very heavy freight.”
“How can smart people so often be wrong? They don’t do what I’m telling you to do: use a checklist to be sure you get all the main models and use them together in a multimodular way.”
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