When all you have is questions, sometimes you want to turn to the experts. When the experts don’t know, or when they give conflicting answers, you want to turn to the Masters.

This is one of those times, and that’s what we did. What would J.P. Morgan, Peter Lynch, Benjamin Graham, Warren Buffet and Winston Churchill have to say about these tough economic times?

Even though some of these men passed away decades ago, we are fortunate that they left some great wisdom behind. Of course they couldn’t all tell us about today’s market, about the 2009 rescue plan or about the great recovery that we would like to think is just around the corner.

But their words can tell us about ourselves. Although the stock market, business, technology and economic trends have changed enormously in the past 60 years, human beings are essentially the same. That makes the voices of the past relevant to us today.

Nobody in the 20th century had a more intimate understanding of peril and crisis than Winston Churchill. Here’s a quote I like from him: “The optimist sees opportunity in every danger. The pessimist sees danger in every opportunity.” Would he say the same thing today? I suspect he would. Incidentally, I recently learned that Churchill spent an entire hour, on average, preparing every single minute of the memorable speeches he made before Parliament. No wonder his words resonate so well down the years.

Churchill knew how to use his time well. But many investors are spending hour after hour in 2009 contemplating the economic pickle we are in and trying to guess or divine what will happen next. I’ve never seen any evidence that such efforts make investors more successful. I find it hard to believe this a productive use of all the time and energy that goes into it.

Sure, an informed citizenry is wonderful, and we are fortunate to live in a country where our leaders are obligated to care what we think. But does it help us as investors? Here’s what Peter Lynch, once a famous portfolio manager for Fidelity Investments, had to say: “If you spend 13 minutes a year trying to predict the economy, you have wasted 10 minutes.” Ouch!

Lynch is not alone in that view. Don Phillips, managing director of Morningstar Inc., has studied investors as diligently as anybody over the past couple of decades. “We have found that the fund managers who tend to perform the best over time are the ones who spend the least amount of time debating which way the market is heading,” Phillips once wrote.

As investors, we have essentially no control over the economy and the stock market. But often we act as if we knew that we should have that control. And when we inevitably fail to exercise that control, our emotions kick in. Usually they lead us astray. Here’s a quote from the great investment guru Benjamin Graham: “Individuals who cannot master their emotions are ill-suited to profit from the investment process.”

I hope you’ll read that again, because it’s the key to a lot of things happening right now.

The airwaves and the internet and the print media are filled these days with gloom and doom. Most people seem to think the current state of affairs is bad. Common sense would tell us anybody who thought otherwise was a fool. So think about these words from Warren Buffett, one of the savviest and wealthiest investment managers of our time: “The most common cause of low stock prices is pessimism … We want to do business in such an environment, not because we like pessimism but because we like the prices it produces. Optimism is the enemy of the rational buyer. … We simply attempt to be fearful when others are greedy and to be greedy only when others are fearful.”

And speaking of emotions, I want to end with a story told by Burton Malkiel, an economist and the author of “A Random Walk Down Wall Street.” The story involves J.P. Morgan, a dominant banker and financier of the early 20th century. The story gets to the heart of the real question plaguing nervous investors these days: What should they do?

Morgan once had a friend who was so worried about his investments that he was losing sleep. He asked Morgan: “What should I do about my stocks?” Morgan replied: “Sell down to your sleeping point.”

Morgan knew that fearful investors who can’t sleep at night are unlikely to be successful. They have to find the right balance between greed and fear, desire and comfort. High investment returns come with a high price: risk and angst. When you as an investor find your own “sleeping point,” in Morgan’s words, then you can be relatively content to let the rest of the world worry about things that it can neither control nor predict.  

Paul Merriman is founder of Merriman .