Munger’s infamous quotes live on. Here are some of the best

On risk-taking

“What you have to learn is to fold early when the odds are against you, or if you have a big edge, back it heavily because you don’t get a big edge often. Opportunity comes, but it doesn’t come often, so seize it when it does come.”

On fairness

“The safest way to try to get what you want is to try to deserve what you want. It’s such a simple idea. It’s the golden rule. You want to deliver to the world what you would buy if you were on the other end.

“There is no ethos in my opinion that is better for any lawyer or any other person to have. By and large, the people who’ve had this ethos win in life, and they don’t win just money and honours. They win the respect, the deserved trust of the people they deal with. And there is huge pleasure in life to be obtained from getting deserved trust.”

On patience

“The big money is not in the buying or selling, but in the waiting.”

On crypto

“I don’t like either fraud or delusion. And the delusion may be more extreme than the fraud.”

On envy

“Here’s one truth that perhaps your typical investment counsellor would disagree with: if you’re comfortably rich and someone else is getting richer faster than you by, for example, investing in risky stocks, so what?! Someone will always be getting richer faster than you. This is not a tragedy.”

On thinking

“The ability to destroy your ideas rapidly instead of slowly when the occasion is right, is one of the most valuable things. You have to work hard on it.

“Ask yourself what are the arguments on the other side. It’s bad to have an opinion you’re proud of if you can’t state the arguments for the other side better than your opponents. This is a great mental discipline.”

On building Berkshire Hathaway

“In its early Buffett years, Berkshire had a big task ahead: turning a tiny stash into a large and useful company. And it solved that problem by avoiding bureaucracy and relying much on one thoughtful leader for a long, long time as he kept improving and brought in more people like himself.

“Compare this to a typical big-corporation system with much bureaucracy at headquarters and a long succession of CEOs who come in at about age 59, pause little thereafter for quiet thought, and are soon forced out by a fixed retirement age.”

On wisdom

“People are trying to be smart. All I am trying to do is not to be idiotic, but it’s harder than most people think.”

On his life and times

“Somebody my age has lived through the best and easiest period that ever happened in the history of the world – the lowest death rates, the highest investment production, biggest increases in most people’s standards of living. If you’re unhappy with what you’ve had over the last 50 years, you have an unfortunate misappraisal of life.”

On reading

“In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn’t read all the time – none, zero ... You’d be amazed at how much Warren reads – at how much I read. My children laugh at me. They think I’m a book with a couple of legs sticking out.”

On how to live

“Let me use a little inversion now. What will really fail in life? What do we want to avoid? Some answers are easy. For example, sloth and unreliability will fail. If you’re unreliable it doesn’t matter what your virtues are, you’re going to crater immediately. So, faithfully doing what you’ve engaged to do should be an automatic part of your conduct.”

“Hard work, honesty, if you keep at it, will get you almost anything.”

On humility

“We have three baskets for investing: yes, no, and too tough to understand.”

On investing

“You’re looking for a mispriced gamble. That’s what investing is. And you have to know enough to know whether the gamble is mispriced. That’s value investing.”

On death

“I am trying to emulate my great-grandfather. When he died, they said about him, ‘Nobody envied the success, so fairly won and wisely used’.”