Great Throughts Treasury

"See the investment world as an ocean and buy where you get the most value for your money. Right now the value is in non-callable bonds. Most bonds are callable so when they start going up in price, the debtor calls them away from you. But the non-callable bonds, especially those non-callable for 25-30 years, can go way up in price if interest rates go way down."

"Sell when you find a much better bargain to replace what you are selling."

"Success is a process of continually seeking answers to new questions."

"People are always asking me where is the outlook good, but that’s the wrong question…. The right question is: Where is the outlook the most miserable?"

"Search for bargains. You should try to buy that particular investment whose market price is lowest in relation to your estimate of its true value."

"Successful investing is only common sense. Each system for investing will eventually become obsolete."

"Suppose you went to your priest and asked for help - he would refer you to the Bible, but if you went the next day to your medical doctor, and he referred you to the book of Hippocrates, which was written at about the same time as the Bible, you would think that was old-fashioned."

"Tell your readers to use it or lose it. If you don't use your muscles, they get weak. If you don't use your mind it begins to fail."

"The idea that an individual can find God is terribly self-centered. It is like a wave thinking it can find the sea."

"The correct description is that we try every day to become more humble when we talk about divinity, we try to realize how little we know and how open minded we should be. It's self-centered to think that human beings, as limited as we are, can describe divinity."

"The four most dangerous words in investing are 'This time it's different.'"

"The more love we give away, the more we have left. The laws of love differ from the laws of arithmetic. Love hoarded dwindles, but love given grows. If we give all our love, we will have more left than he who saves some. Giving love, not receiving is important; but when we give with no thought of receiving we automatically, and inescapably receive abundantly. Heaven is a by-product of love. When we say, I love you, we mean that a little of God's love flows from me to you. Thereby, we do not love less, but more. For in flowing, the quantity is magnified."

"The main focus in my life now is to open people's minds so no one will be so conceited that they think they have the total truth. They should be eager to learn, to listen, to research and not to confine, to hurt, to kill, those who disagree with them."

"The objective of our religious foundations is to teach people that they are hurting themselves when they say they believe something. What we should realize is we know almost nothing about God and therefore we should be eager to search and to learn."

"The only certainty about the future is the fact that it will be different from the past."

"The long-range view requires patience."

"The other boys at Yale came from wealthy families, and none of them were investing outside the United States, and I thought, 'That is very egotistical. Why be so shortsighted or near-sighted as to focus only on America? Shouldn't you be more open-minded?"

"The only investors who shouldn’t diversify are those who are right 100 percent of the time."

"The question is not is there a God, but is there anything else except God God is everyone and each of us is a little bit."

"The time to buy a stock is when the short-term owners have finished selling and the time to sell a stock is often when short-term owners have finished their buying."

"This trend toward greater capitalism and freedom unleashes tremendous potential for efficiency gains and even greater wealth potential. So does the shift away from regulation and isolation toward free trade."

"Those who spend too much will eventually be owned by those who are thrifty."

"The single-minded focus has been on attracting tech visitors. By and large the city does not appreciate the value that its diverse neighborhoods can bring to its tourism promotion."

"Things are never as good as they seem or as bad as they seem."

"Three of my children are medical doctors, they know at least a hundred times as much about your body as my grandfather knew, but they don't know much more about soul than he did."

"We hope that there will be nothing that conflicts with anybody's religion or faith. We would never say a person's religion is not effective. We say, 'Would you be interested in something more effective?' We always put things in an optimistic, progressive perspective. Do you want to make your prayers more effective? Not that they are not effective, but do you want to help them become more effective?'"

"We are trying to persuade people that no human has yet grasped 1% of what can be known about spiritual realities. So we are encouraging people to start using the same methods of science that have been so productive in other areas, in order to discover spiritual realities."

"To buy when others are despondently selling and to sell when others are avidly buying requires the greatest fortitude… and pays the greatest reward"

"We may find the Divine to be 3,000 times what we think it is now. It's like asking the tulip there to explain you. The tulip is a beautiful creation, with millions of atoms cooperating with each other to produce great beauty, but ask that tulip to talk about you, and it can't do it. It doesn't have those perceptive abilities. Wouldn't it be conceited to suggest that I had the abilities to describe the deity?"

"When asked about living and working in the Bahamas during his management of the Templeton Group, Templeton replied, I've found my results for investment clients were far better here than when I had my office in 30 Rockefeller Plaza. When you're in Manhattan, it's much more difficult to go opposite the crowd."

"Work at being a humble person."