At heart, "uncertainty" and "investing" are synonyms.

While enthusiasm may be necessary for great accomplishments elsewhere, on Wall Street it almost invariably leads to disaster

The essence of investment management is the management of risks, not the management of returns.

No matter how careful you are, the one risk no investor can ever eliminate is the risk of being wrong. Only by insisting on what Graham called the "margin of safety" - never overpaying, no matter how exciting an investment seems to be - can you minimize your odds of error.

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.

The investor who permits himself to be stampeded or unduly worried by unjustified market declines in his holdings is perversely transforming his basic advantage into a basic disadvantage.

Nothing important on Wall Street can be counted on to occur exactly in the same way as it happened before.