Top 968 Quotes & Sayings by Warren Buffett - Page 4

Most people get interested in stocks when everyone else is. The time to get interested is when no one else is. You can't buy what is popular and do well.

Never depend on a single source of income.

A lot of great fortunes in the world have been made by owning a single wonderful business. If you understand the business, you don't need to own very many of them.

When they get their ego involved, people do things they shouldn't do.

Cultivate curiosity and strive to become a little wiser every day.

I make plenty of mistakes and I'll make plenty more mistakes, too. That's part of the game. You've just got to make sure that the right things overcome the wrong ones.

When people tell me they've learned from experience, I tell them the trick is to learn from other people's experience.

If you knew what was going to happen in the economy, you still wouldn't necessarily know what was going to happen in the stock market.

I was lucky to have the right heroes. Tell me who your heroes are and I'll tell you how you'll turn out to be. The qualities of the one you admire are the traits that you, with a little practice, can make your own, and that, if practiced, will become habit forming.

Ignore the stock market, ignore the economy, and buy a business you understand.

I may have more money than you, but money doesn't make the difference. If there is any difference between you and me, it may simply be that I get up and have a chance to do what I love to do, every day. If you learn anything from me, this is the best advice I can give you.

A CEO's behavior has a huge impact on managers down the line.

Tell me your heroes and I'll tell you how your life will end up

I insist on a lot of time being spent, almost every day, to just sit and think. That is very uncommon in American business.

I'd rather have a $10 million business making 15 per cent than a $100 million business making 5 per cent.

To invest successfully over a lifetime does not require a stratospheric IQ, unusual business insights, or inside information. What's needed is a sound intellectual framework for making decisions and the ability to keep emotions from corroding that framework. You must supply the emotional discipline.

Never invest in a business you can't understand

If the reason for doing something is that everyone else is doing it, it's not a good enough reason.

Intrinsic value can be defined simply: It is the discounted value of the cash that can be taken out of a business during its remaining life.

People will always try to stop you from doing the right thing if it is unconventional.

You’d get very rich if you thought of yourself as having a card with only twenty punches in a lifetime, and every financial decision used up one punch. You’d resist the temptation to dabble. You’d make more good decisions and you’d make more big decisions.

They say the chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken. The chains you put around yourself now have enormous consequences as you go through life.

You have to be able to communicate in life and probably schools underemphasize that. If you can't talk to people or write, you're giving up your potential.

I don't need 15 houses. Owning real estate doesn't mean much to me. I don't like to think about things like that. I don't need 12 boats, or even the world's largest boat with a crew of 80. I'd have to take care of them, to worry about them. I get a lot more fun out of life without all the bells and whistles.

I never invest in anything that I don't understand.

If you invested in a very low cost index fund - where you don't put the money in at one time, but average in over 10 years -you'll do better than 90% of people who start investing at the same time.

Never give up searching for the job that you’re passionate about. Try to find the job you’d have if you were independently rich. Forget about the pay. When you’re associating with the people that you love, doing what you love, it doesn’t get any better than that.

As an investor with small capital, one should prefer businesses that have high returns on capital and that require little incremental investment to grow.

We don't get paid for activity, just for being right. As to how long we'll wait, we'll wait indefinitely.

Be fearful when there is greed and be greedy when there is fear.

Never ask a barber if you need a haircut.

Investing is simple, but not easy.

The (stock) market is there only as a reference point to see if anybody is offering to do anything foolish. When we invest in stocks, we invest in businesses.

No matter how great the talent or efforts, some things just take time.

Whether we’re talking about socks or stocks, I like buying quality merchandise when it is marked down.

All I have to do is think and not be influenced by others.

You know ... you keep doing the same things and you keep getting the same result over and over again.

It is not necessary to do extraordinary things to get extraordinary results.

It is more important to say "no" to an opportunity, than to say "yes".

First come the innovators, then come the imitators, then come the idiots.

Risk comes from not knowing what you are doing so wide diversification is only required when investors are ignorant. You only have to do a very few things in your life so long as you don't do too many things wrong.

You can't make a good deal with a bad person.

Gold has two significant shortcomings, being neither of much use nor procreative.

The most important investment you can make is in yourself. Very few people get anything like their potential horsepower translated into the actual horsepower of their output in life. Potential exceeds realization for many people...The best asset is your own self. You can become to an enormous degree the person you want to be.

Benign neglect, bordering on sloth, remains the hallmark of our investment process.

The best thing I did was choose the right heroes.

If you know how to value businesses, it's crazy to own 50 stocks or 40 stocks or 30 stocks, probably because there aren't that many wonderful businesses understandable to a single human being in all likelihood. To forego buying more of some super-wonderful business and instead put your money into #30 or #35 on your list of attractiveness just strikes Charlie and me as madness.

You can't produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant.

Sound investing can make you very wealthy if you're not in too big a hurry

Basically, the single-most important decision in evaluating a business is pricing power.

The great personal fortunes in the country weren't built on a portfolio of fifty companies. They were built by someone who identified one wonderful business. With each investment you make, you should have the courage and the conviction to place at least 10% of your net worth in that stock.

Good big decisions do not take time at all, if they do you are in trouble.

Someone's sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago. The person sitting in the shade now should be grateful for the person who planted and tended that tree. That includes all those benefactors of humanity throughout history that created, invented, financed, produced, maintained and improved all that we enjoy today.

Success in investing doesn’t correlate with I.Q. Once you are above the level of 25; once you have ordinary intelligence, what you need is the temperament to control the urges that get other people into trouble in investing.

Do not put all your eggs in one basket.

If you lose money for the firm, I will be forgiving. If you lose reputation, I will be ruthless.

Knowing what to leave out is just as important as knowing what to focus on.

I think the worst mistake you can make in stocks is to buy or sell based on current headlines.

The stock market is a wonderfully efficient mechanism for transferring wealth from the impatient to the patient.

The best education you can get is investing in yourself, and that doesn't mean college or university.