Beware the fury of the patient man.
We simply attempt to be fearful when others are greedy and to be greedy only when others are fearful.
Courage is not the absence of fear, but the mastery of it.
Anybody can become angry - that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way - that is not within everybody's power and is not easy.
It is better to be loved rather than feared, or feared rather than loved? It might perhaps be answered that we should wish to be both: but since love and fear can hardly exist together, if we must choose between them, it is far safer to be feared than loved.
As long as a word remains unspoken, you are its master; once you utter it, you are its slave.
It is not that I do not get angry. I don't give vent to my anger. I cultivate the quality of patience as angerlessness, and generally speaking, I succeed. But I only control my anger when it comes. How I find it possible to control it would be a useless question, for it is a habit that everyone must cultivate and must succeed in forming by constant practice.
SELF-DISCIPLINE, more than any other personal quality I can think of, is the one thing that separates successful people from the unsuccessful. Think of all it encompasses: honoring commitments, promises and deadlines, keeping your life on schedule, being willing to go the extra mile... Self-discipline is essential to success. The alternative is a life ruled by emotions, and none of us can afford that if we're going to fulfill our purpose and realize our potential.
Investing requires qualities of temperament way more than it requires qualities of intellect.
To be a good sportsman, one must be a stoic and never show rancor in defeat, or triumph in victory, or irritation, no matter what annoyance is encountered. One who can not help sulking, or explaining, or protesting when the loser, or exulting when the winner, has no right to take part in games or contests.
After spending many years in Wall Street and after making and losing millions of dollars I want to tell you this: It never was my thinking that made the big money for me. It always was my sitting. Got that? My sitting tight!
Today I will be the master of my emotions.
If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.
Men who can both be right and sit tight are uncommon. I found it one of the hardest things to learn. But it is only after a stock operator has firmly grasped this that he can make big money.
He who gains a victory over other men is strong; but he who gains a victory over himself is all powerful.
The most important quality for an investor is temperament, not intellect.
When we are angry, our anger is our very self. To suppress or chase away our anger is to suppress or chase away ourselves. When anger is born, we can be aware that anger is an energy in us, and we can change that energy into another kind of energy. If we want to transform it, first we have to know how to accept it.
Temperance is a mean with regard to pleasures.
You can tell the size of a man by the size of the thing that makes him mad.
Virtue depends partly upon training and partly upon practice; you must learn first, and then strengthen your learning by action. If this be true, not only do the doctrines of wisdom help us but the precepts also, which check and banish our emotions by a sort of official decree.
Those who hate you don't win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.
One of the most helpful things that anybody can learn is to give up trying to catch the last eighth - or the first. These two are the most expensive eighths in the world. They have cost stock traders, in the aggregate, enough millions of dollars to build a concrete highway across the continent.
Fear is stronger than love
A lot of people with high IQs are terrible investors because they've got terrible temperaments. And that is why we say that having a certain kind of temperament is more important than brains. You need to keep raw irrational emotion under control. You need patience and discipline and an ability to take losses and adversity without going crazy. You need an ability to not be driven crazy by extreme success
No man is such a conqueror, as the one that has defeated himself.
