Some of our favorite quotes...............

This above all, --to thine own self be true;

And it must follow, as the night the day,

Thou canst not then be false to any man.

-- Polonius, Hamlet: Act I, Scene 3

The first rule in investing: don't lose any money. The second rule: don't forget the first rule.

-- Warren Buffett

Selling a soybean contract short is worth two years at the Harvard Business School.

-- Robert Stovall

I was born on November 7, but I celebrate my birthday on July 24.  That's the day I began to live, the day I saw the Statue of Liberty.

-- George Mardikian

The list of qualities (an investor should have) include patience, self-reliance, common sense, a tolerance for pain, open-mindedness, detachment, persistence, humility, flexibility, a willingness to do independent research, an equal willingness to admit mistakes, and the ability to ignore general panic.

-- Peter Lynch

In this game, the market has to keep pitching, but you don’t have to swing. You can stand there with the bat on your shoulder for six months until you get a fat pitch.

-- Warren Buffett

People should be more concerned with the return of their principal than the return on their principal.

-- Jim Rogers

Wall Street is littered with the ruins of people who mined for patterns in the data and invested on them without knowing why they should work.

-- John Hussman, PhD

I made my money by selling too soon.

-- Bernard Baruch

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

-- Upton Sinclair

In the next ten to twenty years, the changes we are going to see in terms of new centers of wealth will be mind-boggling. Only investors who understand this will be able to capitalize on the changes.

-- Marc Faber

I measure what’s going on, and I adapt to it. I try to get my ego out of the way. The market is smarter than I am so I bend.

-- Martin Zweig

Confronted with the challenge to distil the secret of sound investment into three words, we venture the motto, Margin of Safety.

-- Benjamin Graham

Buying and holding is far from the sure thing it's made out to be. It works in bull markets. It works if you invest regularly, in dribs and drabs, catching the ups and downs along the way. It works in mild bear markets, when the declines are quickly reversed. It may work if you've got twenty years to wait for a stock to recover from a half-off sale. Otherwise, it's risky. It's very risky when you're holding stocks you bought at extravagant prices. It's extremely risky when your retirement depends on a positive result and you're planning to take up golf in a decade or less.

-- John Rothchild

Don’t put all your eggs in one basket, or put your eggs in one basket and watch the basket.

-- Anonymous

J.P. Morgan once had a friend who was so worried about his stock holdings that he could not sleep at night.  The friend asked, 'What should I do about my stocks?' Morgan replied, 'Sell down to your sleeping point'  Every investor must decide the trade-off he or she is willing to make between eating well and sleeping well. High investment rewards can only be achieved at the cost of substantial risk-taking. So what is your sleeping point? Finding the answer to this question is one of the most important investment steps you must take.

-- Burton Malkiel

There is only one side of the market and it is not the bull side or the bear side, but the right side.

-- Jesse Livermore

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My 401(k) has been reduced to a 201(k).

-- Anonymous

There are no secrets to success. Don't waste your time looking for them. Success is the result of perfection, hard work, learning from failure, loyalty to those for whom you work, and persistence.

-- Colin Powell

Every time everyone's talking about something, that's the time to sell.

          -- George Lindemann

Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.

          -- Charles Mackay

It's not that I am so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer.

-- Albert Einstein

If you want formulas, I'll give you formulas.  If you want rules of thumb, I'll give you rules of thumb.  But as much as you resist it, the correct answer to your question is, 'It depends.'"

-- Humberto Cruz, financial columnist, responding to a reader's request for a rule of thumb about how much retirement savings is enough, Journal of Financial Planning

If a man empties his purse into his head no one can take it away from him. An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.

-- Benjamin Franklin

It's not whether you're right or wrong that's important, but how much money you make when you're right and how much you lose when you're wrong.

-- George Soros

It isn't as important to buy as cheap as possible as it is to buy at the right time.

-- Jesse Livermore

Bond investors are the vampires of the investment world. They love decay, recession - anything that leads to low inflation and the protection of the real value of their loans.

-- Bill Gross

Never invest in any idea you can't illustrate with a crayon.

-- Peter Lynch

The quality of a person's life is in direct proportion to their commitment to excellence, regardless of their chosen field of endeavor.

-- Vince Lombardi

The hardest thing in the world to understand is income tax.

-- Albert Einstein

The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.

-- John Kenneth Galbraith

If all the economists in the world were laid end to end, they still wouldn't reach a conclusion.

-- George Bernard Shaw

Chance favors the informed mind.

-- Louis Pasteur

There's nothing wrong with cash. It gives you time to think.

-- Robert Prechter, Jr.

The power of accurate observation is frequently called cynicism by those who don't have it.

-- George Bernard Shaw

The word "crisis" in Chinese is composed of two characters: the first, the symbol of danger; the second, opportunity.

-- Anonymous

The facts are unimportant! It's what they are perceived to be that determines the course of events.

-- R. Earl Hadady

It's a lot of fun finding a country that nobody knows about. The only thing better is finding a country everybody's bullish on and shorting it.

-- Jim Rogers

It is a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it.

-- W. Somerset Maugham

Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.

-- Walter Lippmann

When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.

-- Eric Hoffer

Anyone seeking a work-life balance, especially entrepreneurs, will appreciate this Zen quote:

The Master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his education and his recreation, his love and his religion.  He hardly knows which is which.  He simply pursues his vision of excellence in everything he does, leaving others to determine whether he is at work or at play.  To him, he is always doing both.

-- Zen Buddhist Text