Warren Buffett Quotes

111 Sourced Quotes

Take the job that you would take if you were independently wealthy.

Warren Buffett
It's a game of a million inferences. There are a lot of things to draw inferences from — cards played and not played. These inferences tell you something about the probabilities. It's got to be the best intellectual exercise out there. You're seeing through new situations every ten minutes. Bridge is about weighing gain/loss ratios. You're doing calculations all the time.

Warren Buffett
I just read and read and read.... I have always enjoyed reading.

Warren Buffett
Our stay-put behavior reflects our view that the stock market serves as a relocation center at which money is moved from the active to the patient.

Warren Buffett
It's simply to say that managers and investors alike must understand that accounting numbers is the beginning, not the end, of business valuation.

Warren Buffett
I try to buy stock in businesses that are so wonderful that an idiot can run them. Because sooner or later, one will.

Warren Buffett
Putting people into homes, though a desirable goal, shouldn't be our country's primary objective. Keeping them in their homes should be the ambition.

Warren Buffett
After all, you only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out.

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

Warren Buffett
The most common cause of low prices is pessimism — some times pervasive, some times specific to a company or industry. We want to do business in such an environment, not because we like pessimism but because we like the prices it produces. It's optimism that is the enemy of the rational buyer.

Warren Buffett
Nothing sedates rationality like large doses of effortless money.

Warren Buffett
The greater the potential for reward in the value portfolio, the less risk there is.

Warren Buffett
The range of derivatives contracts is limited only by the imagination of man (or sometimes, so it seems, madmen). Say you want to write a contract speculating on the number of twins to be born in Nebraska in 2020. No problem-at a price, you will easily find an obliging counterparty.

Warren Buffett
Success in investing doesn't correlate with I. Q. once you're 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.

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

Warren Buffett
If I was running $1 million today, or $10 million for that matter, I'd be fully invested. Anyone who says that size does not hurt investment performance is selling. The highest rates of return I've ever achieved were in the 1950s. I killed the Dow. You ought to see the numbers. But I was investing peanuts then. It's a huge structural advantage not to have a lot of money. I think I could make you 50% a year on $1 million. No, I know I could. I guarantee that.

Warren Buffett
The worst sort of business is one that grows rapidly, requires significant capital to engender the growth, and then earns little or no money. Think airlines. Here a durable competitive advantage has proven elusive ever since the days of the Wright Brothers. Indeed, if a farsighted capitalist had been present at Kitty Hawk, he would have done his successors a huge favor by shooting Orville down.

Warren Buffett
We will reject interesting opportunities rather than over-leverage our balance sheet.

Warren Buffett
It's only when the tide goes out that you learn who's been swimming naked.

Warren Buffett
Never count on making a good sale. Have the purchase price be so attractive that even a mediocre sale gives good results.

Warren Buffett
The line separating investment and speculation, which is never bright and clear, becomes blurred still further when most market participants have recently enjoyed triumphs. Nothing sedates rationality like large doses of effortless money. After a heady experience of that kind, normally sensible people drift into behavior akin to that of Cinderella at the ball.

Warren Buffett
Our performance, relatively, is likely to be better in a bear market than in a bull market … in a year when the general market had a substantial advance, I would be well satisfied to match the advance of the averages.

Warren Buffett
In the end we must have people to match our principles, not the reverse.

Warren Buffett
We do not view the company itself as the ultimate owner of our business assets but instead view the company as a conduit through which our shareholders own assets.

Warren Buffett
Long ago, Sir Isaac Newton gave us three laws of motion, which were the work of genius. But Sir Isaac's talents didn't extend to investing: He lost a bundle in the South Sea Bubble, explaining later, "I can calculate the movement of the stars, but not the madness of men." If he had not been traumatized by this loss, Sir Isaac might well have gone on to discover the Fourth Law of Motion: For investors as a whole, returns decrease as motion increases.

Warren Buffett