“If human nature felt no temptation to take a chance there might not be much investment merely as a result of cold calculation.”

It economics is a method rather than a doctrine, an apparatus of the mind, a technique of thinking which helps its possessor to draw correct conclusions.

In truth, the gold standard is already a barbarous relic.

The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.

It is the duty of the long-term investor to endure great losses with equanimity.

Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.

Gold is a relic from a time when government’s were less trustworthy in these matters (currency debasement) than they are now.

I do not know which makes a man more conservative – to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past.

Economics is a very dangerous science.

Like all his type, Newton was wholly aloof from women.

I was suffering from my chronic delusion that one good share is safer than ten bad ones, and I am always forgetting that hardly anyone else shares this particular delusion.

The forces of the nineteenth century have run their course and are exhausted.

What an extraordinary episode in the economic progress of man that age was which came to an end in August, 1914!

Nothing mattered except states of mind, chiefly our own.

I believe myself to be writing a book on economic theory which will largely revolutionize – not, I suppose, at once but in the course of the next ten years – the way the world thinks about economic problems.

The boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity at the Treasury.

The central principle of investment is to go contrary to the general opinion, on the grounds that if everyone agreed about its merits, the investment is inevitably too dear and therefore unattractive.