Top 968 Quotes & Sayings by Warren Buffett - Page 7

Credit worthiness is like virginity, it can be preserved but not restored very easily, so it is crazy to play around with it.

I look for businesses in which I think I can predict what they're going to look like in ten to fifteen years time. Take Wrigley's chewing gum. I don't think the internet is going to change how people chew gum.

The secret is to find what you love to do.I mean, I tell the students look for the job that you would take if you didn't need a job. I mean, it's that simple. And I was lucky enough to find it very early in life. And then the second thing is to have people around you that make feel good every day, and make you a better person than you otherwise would be.

We're perfectly willing to trade away a big payoff for a certain payoff.

What an investor needs is the ability to correctly evaluate selected businesses. Note that word “selected”: You don't have to be an expert on every company, or even many. You only have to be able to evaluate companies within your circle of competence. The size of that circle is not very important; knowing its boundaries, however, is vital.

No formula in finance tells you that the moat is 28 feet wide and 16 feet deep. That's what drives the academics crazy. They can compute standard deviations and betas, but they can't understand moats.

The banking business is no favorite of ours. When assets are twenty times equity - a common ratio in this industry - mistakes that involve only a small portion of assets can destroy a major portion of equity. And mistakes have been the rule rather than the exception at many major banks.

A very rich person should leave his kids enough to do anything, but not enough to do nothing.

I measure success by how many people love me. And the best way to be loved is to be lo veable.

What we learn from history is that people don't learn from history.

I have pledged - to you, the rating agencies and myself - to always run Berkshire with more than ample cash. We never want to count on the kindness of strangers in order to meet tomorrow's obligations. When forced to choose, I will not trade even a night's sleep for the chance of extra profits.

I mean you know at midnight everything is going to turn to pumpkins and mice; right? But if the evening goes along, I mean, you know, the guys look better all the time, the music sounds better, it's more and more fun, you think why the hell should I leave at quarter of 12. I'll leave at two minutes to 12. But the trouble is, there are no clocks on the wall. And everybody thinks they're going to leave at two minutes to 12.

There is seldom just one cockroach in the kitchen. You know, you turn on the light and, all of sudden, they all start scurrying around.

Unless your answers are clearly better, copy the answers of your betters.

Mark Zuckerberg will be a hero to many young entrepreneurs 20 years from now. Bill Gates will be a hero to others, and they will look to those [people] like I read books when I was in my teens about Rockefeller or Carnegie.

Success is having people love you that you want to have love you.

The ideal business is one that earns very high returns on capital and that keeps using lots of capital at those high returns. That becomes a compounding machine.

Risk can be greatly reduced by concentrating on only a few holdings.

In other words, the percentage change in book value in any given year is likely to be reasonably close to that year's change in intrinsic value.

In the financial markets I find it easy to predict what will happen and very difficult to predict when it will happen. I think that things were clear during the bubble as to what would happen eventually.

Don't settle for anything other than your passion - if you're lucky enough to find it.

We intend to continue our practice of working only with people whom we like and admire. This policy not only maximizes our chances for good results, it also ensures us an extraordinarily good time.

We will only do with your money what we would do with our own.

Never get too hung up on mistakes.

If you gave me the choice of being CEO of General Electric or IBM or General Motors, you name it, or delivering papers, I would deliver papers. I would. I enjoyed doing that. I can think about what I want to think. I don't have to do anything I don't want to do.

The three most important words in investing...Margin of Safety.

Beware [of] the investment activity that produces applause; the great moves are usually greeted by yawns.

I'm happy when I can spend every day doing the things that I like to do. That's my luxury.

I choose to work with every single person that I work with. That ends up being the most important factor. I don't interact with people I don't like or admire. That's the key. It's like marrying.

Charlie [Munger] and I are not big fans of resumes. Instead, we focus on brains, passion and integrity.

Money will always flow toward opportunity, and there is an abundance of that in America.

When Berkshire Hathaway laid out three billion dollars for GE today, we didn't spend it, we invested it. When the Federal government buys the mortgages, they're not spending it, they're investing it. Now, they're investing it in distress type assets but they're buying them at distress prices if they buy them at market. It's the kind of stuff I love to do. I just don't have 700 million. Maybe we could go in it together.

I prefer liquor store robbers with hungry kids to companies that locate offshore to avoid U.S. taxes.

Of one thing be certain: if a CEO is enthused about a particularly foolish acquisition, both his internal staff and his outside advisors will come up with whatever projections are needed to justify his stance. Only in fairy tales are emperors told that they are naked.

There's no use running if you're on the wrong road.

An IPO is like a negotiated transaction - the seller chooses when to come public - and it's unlikely to be a time that's favourable to you.

If you don't know jewelry, know the jeweler.

There are three important principles to Graham's approach. [The first is to look at stocks as fractional shares of a business, which] gives you an entirely different view than most people who are in the market. [The second principle is the margin-of-safety concept, which] gives you the competitive advantage. [The third is having a true investor's attitude toward the stock market, which] if you have that attitude, you start out ahead of 99 percent of all the people who are operating in the stock market - it's an enormous advantage.

When somebody makes it very easy for you to do it by saying you don't really have to put up my money, you can lie about your income a little, or we'll give you 100 percent mortgage, you're going to do it, because everybody that's done it has been proven right. You have social tools, and you're going to feel like an idiot if you didn't do it, because the house cost more.

You need a lot of curiosity for a long, long time.

The purpose of life is to be loved by as many people as possible among those you want to have love you

If knowing history made you rich, librarians would be billionaires.

The extraordinary business does not require good management.

Do what you love and work for whom you admire the most, and you've given yourself the best chance in life you can.

That would be nice if [people] stuck [treasury bills] all under a mattress, but they got to buy something with them. Sometimes they buy a treasury note, sometimes they set up sovereign wealth funds. They can do all kinds of things. They can buy our companies here. As long as we consume more than we produce, and we trade away little pieces of the country daily, they're going to own something. Now, they can't run from American assets. I mean every day the rest of the world is going to have about two billion more of American assets than we have, as long as they sell us these goods.

If you understood a business perfectly and the future of the business, you would need very little in the way of a margin of safety. So, the more vulnerable the business is, assuming you still want to invest in it, the larger margin of safety you'd need. If you're driving a truck across a bridge that says it holds 10,000 pounds and you've got a 9,800 pound vehicle, if the bridge is 6 inches above the crevice it covers, you may feel okay, but if it's over the Grand Canyon, you may feel you want a little larger margin of safety.

You have to understand accounting and you have to understand the nuances of accounting. It's the language of business and it's an imperfect language, but unless you are willing to put in the effort to learn accounting - how to read and interpret financial statements - you really shouldn't select stocks yourself

If you don’t feel comfortable making a rough estimate of the asset’s future earnings, just forget it and move on. No one has the ability to evaluate every investment possibility. But omniscience isn’t necessary; you only need to understand the actions you undertake.

Well, one time some attractive woman sat next to Charlie and asked him what he owed his success to, and, unfortunately, she insisted on a one word answer. He had a speech prepared that would have gone on for several hours. But when forced to boil it down to one word, he said that was "rational". You know, he comes equipped for rationality, and he applies it in business. He doesn't always apply it elsewhere, but he applies it in business and that has made him a huge business success.

Long ago, Ben Graham taught me that "Price is what you pay; value is what you get." Whether we're talking about socks or stocks, I like buying quality merchandise when it is marked down.

A stock doesn't know that you own it.

The best investment you can make is in yourself.

The power of unconditional love. I mean, there is no power on earth like unconditional love.

The speed at which a business success is recognized, furthermore, is not that important as long as the company's intrinsic value is increasing at a satisfactory rate. In fact, delayed recognition can be an advantage: It may give us the chance to buy more of a good thing at a bargain price.

An investor should ordinarily hold a small piece of an outstanding business with the same tenacity that an owner would exhibit if he owned all of that business.

Our investments continue to be few in number and simple in concept: The truly big investment idea can usually be explained in a short paragraph. We like a business with enduring competitive advantages that is run by able and owner-oriented people. When these attributes exist, and when we can make purchases at sensible prices, it is hard to go wrong (a challenge we periodically manage to overcome).

Investing is not as tough as being a top-notch bridge player. All it takes is the ability to see things as they really are.

The problem with commodities is that you are betting on what someone else would pay for them in six months. The commodity itself isn't going to do anything for you....it is an entirely different game to buy a lump of something and hope that somebody else pays you more for that lump two years from now than it is to buy something that you expect to produce income for you over time.

Money will not change how healthy you are or how many people love you.

With a wonderful business, you can figure out what will happen; you can't figure out when it will happen. You don't want to focus on when, you want to focus on what. If you're right about what, you don't have to worry about when