The Psychology of Money Quotes

“As pessoas mais admiráveis estão cheias de ideias pavorosas que frequentemente são postas em prática.”
― Morgan Housel, A psicologia financeira: lições atemporais sobre fortuna, ganância e felicidade

“Imagining a goal is easy and fun. Imagining a goal in the context of the realistic life stresses that grow with competitive pursuits is something entirely different.”
― Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money: Timeless lessons on wealth, greed, and happiness

“When you accept the End of History Illusion, you realize that the odds of picking a job when you’re not old enough to drink that you will still enjoy when you’re old enough to qualify for Social Security are low.”
― Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money: Timeless lessons on wealth, greed, and happiness

“When planning we focus on what we want to do and can do, neglecting the plans and skills of others whose decisions might affect our outcomes.”
― Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money

“Both in explaining the past and in predicting the future, we focus on the causal role of skill and neglect the role of luck.”
― Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money

“If there’s one way to guard against their damage, it’s avoiding single points of failure”
― Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money

“A lot of things in business and investing work this way. Long tails—the farthest ends of a distribution of outcomes—have tremendous influence in finance, where a small number of events can account for the majority of outcomes.”
― Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money: Timeless lessons on wealth, greed, and happiness

“NYU professor Scott Galloway has a related idea that is so important to remember when judging success—both your own and others’: “Nothing is as good or as bad as it seems.”
― Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money: Timeless lessons on wealth, greed, and happiness

“The wisdom in having room for error is acknowledging that uncertainty, randomness, and chance—“unknowns”—are an ever-present part of life. The only way to deal with them is by increasing the gap between what you think will happen and what can happen while still leaving you capable of fighting another day.”
― Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money: Timeless lessons on wealth, greed, and happiness

“Embracing the idea that financial goals made when you were a different person should be abandoned without mercy versus put on life support and dragged on can be a good strategy to minimize future regret.”
― Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money: Timeless lessons on wealth, greed, and happiness

“But every financial decision a person makes, makes sense to them in that moment and checks the boxes they need to check. They tell themselves a story about what they’re doing and why they’re doing it, and that story has been shaped by their own unique experiences.”
― Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money: Timeless lessons on wealth, greed, and happiness

“We all do crazy stuff with money, because we’re all relatively new to this game and what looks crazy to you might make sense to me. But no one is crazy—we all make decisions based on our own unique experiences that seem to make sense to us in a given moment.”
― Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money: Timeless lessons on wealth, greed, and happiness

“Getting money requires taking risks, being optimistic, and putting yourself out there. But keeping money requires the opposite of taking risk. It requires humility, and fear that what you’ve made can be taken away from you just as fast.”
― Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money: Timeless lessons on wealth, greed, and happiness

“We can spend years trying to figure out how Buffett achieved his investment returns: how he found the best companies, the cheapest stocks, the best managers. That’s hard. Less hard but equally important is pointing out what he didn’t do. He didn’t get carried away with debt. He didn’t panic and sell during the 14 recessions he’s lived through. He didn’t sully his business reputation. He didn’t attach himself to one strategy, one world view, or one passing trend.”
― Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money: Timeless lessons on wealth, greed, and happiness

“The only way to win in a Las Vegas casino is to exit as soon as you enter.”
― Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money

“My favorite Wikipedia entry begins: “Ronald James Read was an American philanthropist, investor, janitor, and gas station attendant.”
― Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money: Timeless lessons on wealth, greed, and happiness

“Physics isn’t controversial. It’s guided by laws. Finance is different. It’s guided by people’s behaviors.”
― Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money: Timeless lessons on wealth, greed, and happiness

“The lowest-income households in the U.S. on average spend $412 a year on lotto tickets, four times the amount of those in the highest income groups. Forty percent of Americans cannot come up with $400 in an emergency.”
― Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money: Timeless lessons on wealth, greed, and happiness

“A genius is the man who can do the average thing when
everyone else around him is losing his mind.” —Napoleon “The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any
chance ever observes.” —Sherlock Holmes”
― Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money

“Money is everywhere, it affects all of us, and confuses most of us. Everyone thinks about it a little differently. It offers lessons on things that apply to many areas of life, like risk, confidence, and happiness. Few topics offer a more powerful magnifying glass that helps explain why people behave the way they do than money. It is one of the greatest shows on Earth.”
― Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money

“Studying history makes you feel like you understand something. But until you’ve lived through it and personally felt its consequences, you may not understand it enough to change your behavior.”
― Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money

“Much of the stuff you people who read finance books either have now, or have a good chance of getting, we don’t. Buying a lottery ticket is the only time in our lives we can hold a tangible dream of getting the good stuff that you already have and take for granted. We are paying for a dream, and you may not understand that because you are already living a dream. That’s why we buy more tickets than you do.”
― Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money

“we all make decisions based on our own unique experiences that seem to make sense to us in a given moment.”
― Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money

“Luck and risk are both the reality that every outcome in life is guided by forces other than individual effort. They are so similar that you can’t believe in one without equally respecting the other. They both happen because the world is too complex to allow 100% of your actions to dictate 100% of your outcomes. They are driven by the same thing: You are one person in a game with seven billion other people and infinite moving parts. The accidental impact of actions outside of your control can be more consequential than the ones you consciously take. But both are so hard to measure, and hard to accept, that they too often go overlooked.”
― Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money

“The line between “inspiringly bold” and “foolishly reckless” can be a millimeter thick and only visible with hindsight. Risk and luck are doppelgangers.”
― Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money

“To make money they didn’t have and didn’t need, they risked what they did have and did need. And that’s foolish. It is just plain foolish. If you risk something that is important to you for something that is unimportant to you, it just does not make any sense. There is no reason to risk what you have and need for what you don’t have and don’t need. It’s one of those things that’s as obvious as it is overlooked.”
― Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money

“We assume that tomorrow won’t be like yesterday. We can’t afford to rest on our laurels. We can’t be complacent. We can’t assume that yesterday’s success translates into tomorrow’s good fortune.”
― Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money

“A mindset that can be paranoid and optimistic at the same time is hard to maintain, because seeing things as black or white takes less effort than accepting nuance. But you need short-term paranoia to keep you alive long enough to exploit long-term optimism.”
― Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money

“we underestimate how normal it is for a lot of things to fail. Which causes us to overreact when they do.”
― Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money

“Something I’ve learned from both investors and entrepreneurs is that no one makes good decisions all the time. The most impressive people are packed full of horrendous ideas that are often acted upon.”
― Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money