Charlie Munger Quotes

If genius has any common denominator, I would propose breadth of interest and the ability to construct fruitful analogies between fields.

You must know the big ideas in the big disciplines, and use them routinely - all of them, not just a few. Most people are trained in one model - economics, for example - and try to solve all problems in one way. You know the old saying: to the man with a hammer, the world looks like a nail. This is a dumb way of handling problems.

I discovered how science is truly a universal language, one that forges new connections among individuals and opens the mind to ideas that go far beyond the classroom.

Every person should make it his business to gather new ideas from sources other than the environment in which he daily lives and works. The mind becomes withered, stagnant, narrow and closed unless it searches for new ideas.

It is a gift when someone can challenge you and open your mind to new ideas.

Not everyone is going to end up being a founder of a company, but the skill of being entrepreneurial, having ideas and going through with them - that skill is so important. Everyone should be imbued with it. Because once you have that, once your brain has been wired for that, all these problems, obstacles, all these things start looking like things you can hack.

The mark of genius is an incessant activity of mind. Genius is a spiritual greed.

As my father [Javāharlāl Nehrū] said, you have to keep an open mind, but you have to pour something into it - otherwise ideas slip away like sand between your fingers.

Friends and family will tell you why your ideas won't work. Most are left-brained employees and specialists and NOT entrepreneurs.

There are but few who have ideas and are, at the same time, capable of action. Ideas enlarge but stymie, action enlivens but confines.

Crazy ideas sometimes work, and the technological society that we have is built on a foundation of those crazy ideas that work.

Live the full life of the mind, exhilarated by new ideas, intoxicated by the Romance of the unusual.

Even if you have no interest in starting a company, having the experience of having ideas and doing them, that's muscle to exercise because that's what people are going to want to see. That's what makes you different.

It was a crazy idea. But, as usual, that’s all Percy had.

It's how creativity works. Especially in humans. For every good idea, ten thousand idiotic ones must first be posed, sifted, tried out, and discarded. A mind that's afraid to toy with the ridiculous will never come up with the brilliantly original.

The mind becomes withered, stagnant, narrow and closed unless it searches for new ideas.

Ideas that most people derided as ridiculous have produced the best outcomes. Don't do the obvious thing.

The critical mind is the creative mind.

Independent thinking is not encouraged in a professional Army. It is a form of mutiny. Obedience is the supreme virtue.

In a living civilization there is always an element of unrest, for sensitiveness to ideas means curiosity, adventure, change. Civilized order survives on its merits and is transformed by its power of recognizing its imperfections.

My advice to graduates is to do anything except what you are trained for. Take that training to a place where it is out of place and stimulate ideas, shake up establishments, and don't take no for an answer.

Everyone wants a definition of creativity that makes what they do into something special and what everyone else does into nothing special. But the fact is, we're all creative. We come up with weird and interesting ideas all the time. The biggest difference between 'creators' isn't their imagination - it's how hard they work. Ideas are easy. Doing stuff is hard.

The scientist has marched in and taken the place of the poet. But one day somebody will find the solution to the problems of the world and remember, it will be a poet, not a scientist.

The youth have a prodigious talent for inventing progressive ideas and alternative courses of action that elude the jaded, in-the-box minds of worn-down adults.

The chief enemy of peace is the spirit of unreason itself: an inability to conceive alternatives, an unwillingness to reconsider old prejudices, to part with ideological obsessions, to entertain new ideas or to improve new plans.