Munger on Happiness

“The first rule of a happy life is low expectations. If you have unrealistic expectations you're going to be miserable your whole life. You want to have reasonable expectations and take life's results, good and bad, as they happen with a certain amount of stoicism.”

“The safest way to try to get what you want is to try to deserve what you want.”

“The highest form which civilization can reach is a seamless web of deserved trust.”

“In your own life what you want is a seamless web of deserved trust. And if your proposed marriage contract has forty-seven pages, my suggestion is do not enter.”

“It's so simple to spend less than you earn, and invest shrewdly, and avoid toxic people and toxic activities, and try to keep learning all your life, and do a lot of deferred gratification because you prefer life that way. And if you do all those things, you are almost certain to succeed. If you don't, you're going to need a lot of luck.”

“Spend less than you make; always be saving something. Put it into a tax-deferred account. Over time, it will begin to amount to something. This is such a no-brainer.”

Wording is stable; the 2003 occasion rests on secondary compilations.

“Gentlemen, may each of you rise high by spending each day of a long life aiming low.”

The ironic closing toast of his 'how to guarantee a life of misery' speech.

“Whenever I feel sad about being in a wheelchair, I think that Roosevelt ran the whole damn country for twelve years in a wheelchair. I'm just trying to make this wheelchair thing last as long as Roosevelt did.”

“We're both smart enough to have watched our friends who got rich build these really fancy houses. And I would say in practically every case, they make the person less happy, not happier.”

“You've got to work where you're turned on. I don't know about Warren, but I have never succeeded to any great extent in something I didn't like doing.”

“If you think you're having a hard life, you got on the wrong planet.”

From Tilson's notes.