50 of The Best Quotes From Warren Buffett
- “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.”
- “Rule No. 1: Never lose money. Rule No. 2: Never forget Rule No. 1.”
- “Risk comes from not knowing what you’re doing.”
- “The stock market is a device for transferring money from the impatient to the patient.”
- “The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything.”
- “In the business world, the rearview mirror is always clearer than the windshield.”
- “Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.”
- “The best thing I ever did was choose the right heroes.”
- “If you’re in the luckiest 1% of humanity, you owe it to the rest of humanity to think about the other 99%.”
- “I always knew I was going to be rich. I don’t think I ever doubted it for a minute.”
- “Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.”
- “The most important investment you can make is in yourself.”
- “It’s better to hang out with people better than you. Pick out associates whose behavior is better than yours and you’ll drift in that direction.”
- If you don’t find a way to make money while you sleep, you will work until you die.
- “The investor of today does not profit from yesterday’s growth.”
- “The only way to get love is to be lovable. It’s very irritating if you have a lot of money. You’d like to think you could write a check: I’ll buy a million dollars’ worth of love. But it doesn’t work that way. The more you give love away, the more you get.”
- “You only have to do a very few things right in your life so long as you don’t do too many things wrong.”
- “You do things when the opportunities come along. I’ve had periods in my life when I’ve had a bundle of ideas come along, and I’ve had long dry spells. If I get an idea next week, I’ll do something. If not, I won’t do a damn thing.”
- “I don’t look to jump over 7-foot bars: I look around for 1-foot bars that I can step over.”
- “The best investment you can make is in your own abilities. Anything you can do to develop your own abilities or business is likely to be more productive.”
- “It’s far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price.”
- “When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact.”
- “Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.”
- “We simply attempt to be fearful when others are greedy and to be greedy only when others are fearful.”
- “The business schools reward difficult complex behavior more than simple behavior, but simple behavior is more effective.”
- “The most important thing to do if you find yourself in a hole is to stop digging.”
- “I don’t believe in pessimism. If something doesn’t come up the way you want, forge ahead. If you think it’s going to rain, it will.”
- “Our favorite holding period is forever.”
- “The big question about how people behave is whether they’ve got an Inner Scorecard or an Outer Scorecard. It helps if you can be satisfied with an Inner Scorecard.”
- “You don’t need to be a rocket scientist. Investing is not a game where the guy with the 160 IQ beats the guy with the 130 IQ.”
- “It’s not necessary to do extraordinary things to get extraordinary results.”
- “You can’t make a good deal with a bad person.”
- “The only way to get to the top is to get off your bottom.”
- “The first rule of investing is don’t lose money; the second rule is don’t forget Rule No. 1.”
- “If you’re not willing to own a stock for ten years, don’t even think about owning it for ten minutes.”
- “The only time to buy these is on a day with no ‘y’ in it.”
- “The most important quality for an investor is temperament, not intellect.”
- “It’s better to be approximately right than precisely wrong.”
- “The best thing I ever did was to choose the right heroes.”
- “You can’t predict the future, but you can prepare for it.”
- “The investor who permits himself to be stampeded or unduly worried by unjustified market declines in his holdings is perversely transforming his basic advantage into a basic disadvantage.”
- “The biggest mistake we make is not learning from our mistakes.”
- “It’s not how much money you make, but how much money you keep, how hard it works for you, and how many generations you keep it for.”
- “It’s better to be a slow follower than a fast failure.”
- “The best thing about investing is that you don’t have to swing at every pitch.”
- “You only have to do a very few things right in your life so long as you don’t do too many things wrong.”
- “Time is the friend of the wonderful company, the enemy of the mediocre.”
- “Opportunities come infrequently. When it rains gold, put out the bucket, not the thimble.”
- “If you’re not willing to react with equanimity to a market price decline of 50% two or three times a century, you’re not fit to be a common shareholder, and you deserve the mediocre result you’re going to get compared to the people who do have the temperament, who can be more philosophical about these market fluctuations.”
- “The most important thing in investing is not how much you know, but rather how realistically you define what you don’t know.”