A good trader has to have three things: a chronic inability to accept things at face value, to feel continuously unsettled, and to have humility.

I was happier when pursuing success than I was when savoring its fruits; the attraction, perhaps the addiction, was in the process, as much as in its end.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the heroes were the long-term investors; today the heroes are the wise guys.

If you see a wonderful archaic Greek marble object in a museum, it's not only that it's beautiful, but what comes to your mind is the fact that it's 2,600 or so years old, and it was done by a human being at that time who you have such a limited ability to grasp - and yet you have this enormous ability to grasp.

Part of my attraction to ancient art is that there is an element of risk, of speculation.

Good investing is a peculiar balance between the conviction to follow your ideas and the flexibility to recognize when you have made a mistake.

The hardest thing over the years has been having the courage to go against the dominant wisdom of the time to have a view that is at variance with the present consensus and bet that view. The hard part is that the investor must measure himself not by his own perceptions of his performance, but by the objective measure of the market. The market has its own reality. In an immediate emotional sense the market is always right so if you take a variant point of view you will always be bombarded for some time by conventional wisdom as expressed by the market.