“A great character and the right temperament will beat a high IQ that lacks them, almost every time.”

“Envy, resentment, revenge, and self-pity are disastrous modes of thought. Self-pity gets pretty close to paranoia, and paranoia is one of the very hardest things to reverse. You do not want to drift into self-pity.”

“Life will have terrible blows in it, horrible blows, unfair blows. It doesn't matter. Some people recover and others don't. And there I think the attitude of Epictetus is the best. He thought that every missed chance in life was an opportunity to behave well, every missed chance in life was an opportunity to learn something.”

“Generally speaking, envy, resentment, revenge, and self-pity are disastrous modes of thought. Every time you find yourself drifting into self-pity, I don't care what the cause, your child could be dying of cancer, self-pity is not going to improve the situation.”

“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.”