78 Warren Buffett Quotes and Advice on Finance and Investing

Short Bio of Warren Buffett: Warren Buffett is the Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway Corporation and richest investor in the world; his company “Berkshire” is one of the highest priced company stocks in the world. Warren Buffett has had a stint as the richest man in the world and he’s popularly known as the “sage of Omaha” or “Oracle of Omaha.” He will be best remembered for his shrewd, yet simple investment strategy. Below are some of Warren Buffett’s quotes, business and investment strategies.

78 Warren Buffett Quotes and Advice on Finance and Investing

1. “If you are in a poker game and after 20 minutes, you don’t know who the patsy is, then you are the patsy.”

2. “Wall street is the only place that people ride to in Rolls Royce to get advice from those who take the subway.”

3. “It is only when the tide goes out that you can see who is swimming naked.”

4. “My two rules of investing: Rule one – never lose money. Rule two – never forget rule one.”

5. “Accounting is the language of business.”

6. “Diversification is a protection against ignorance. It makes very little sense to those who know what they are doing.”

7. “The rich invest in time, the poor invest in money.”

8. “I always knew I was going to be rich. I don’t think I ever doubted it for a minute.”

9. “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and only five Minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you will do things differently.”

10. “Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.”

11. “Without passion, you don’t have energy. Without energy, you have nothing.”

12. “I get to do what I like to do every single day of the year.”

13. “In the business world, the rear view is always clearer than the wind shield.”

14. “Beware of geeks bearing formulas.”

15. “Derivatives are financial weapons of mass destructions.”

16. “I don’t look to jump over 7-foot bars; I look around for 1-foot bars that I can step over.”

17. “If a business does well, the stock eventually follows.”

18. “I never attempt to make money on the stock market. I buy on assumption they could close the market the next day and not re-open it for five years.”

19. “If past history was all that is needed to play the game of money, the richest people would be librarians.”

20. “It is better to hang out with people better than you. Pick out associates whose behavior is better than yours and you will drift in that direction.”

21. “Let block heads read what block heads wrote.”

22. “It is better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than to buy a fair company at a wonderful price.”

23. “Look at market fluctuations as your friend rather than your enemy. Profit from folly rather than participate in it.”

24. “Of the billionaires I have known, money just brings out the basic traits in them. If they were jerks before they had money, they are simply jerks with a billion dollars.”

25. “Price is what you pay, value is what you get.”

26. “Risk comes from not knowing what you are doing.”

27. “Should you find yourself in a chronically leaking boat, energy devoted to changing vessels is likely to be more productive than energy devoted to patching leaks.”

28. “When a management with a reputation of brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact.”

29. “The business schools reward difficult complex behavior more than simple behavior. But simple behavior is more effective.”

30. “We simply attempt to be fearful when others are greedy and to be greedy only when others are fearful.”

31. “Why not invest your assets in the companies you like? As Mae West said, ‘too much of a good thing can be wonderful.”

32. “Your premium brand had better be delivering something special, or it’s not going to get the business.”

33.“Our favorite holding period is forever.”

34. “You only have to do a very few things in your life as long as you don’t do too many things wrong.”

35. “Rule one: Preserve the principal. Rule two: When In doubt, see rule one.”

36. “The investor of today does not profit from yesterday’s growth.”

37. “The smarter the journalists are; the better off the society is to a degree. People read the press to inform themselves; and the better the teacher, the better the student body.”

38. “We enjoy the process far more than the proceeds.”

39. “You do things when the opportunity comes along. I have had periods in my life when I’ve had a bundle of ideas come along, and I have had long dry spells. If I get an idea next week, I’ll do something. If not, I won’t do a damn thing.”

40. “I buy expensive suits. They just look cheap on me.”

78 Warren Buffett Quotes and Advice on Finance and Investing

41. “Let us do or die.”

42. “We believe that according the name ‘investors’ to institutions that trade actively is like calling someone who repeatedly engages in one night stands a ‘romantic”

43. “Risk is part of God’s game, alike for men and nations.”

44. “Time is the friend of the wonderful company; the enemy of the mediocre.”

43. ‘Focus on your customers and lead your people as though their lives depend on your success.”

44. “I have no idea on timing. It’s easier to tell what will happen than when it will happen. I would say that what is going on in terms of trade policy is going to have very important consequences.”

45. “Cash never makes us happy. It’s better to have the money burning a hole in Berkshire’s pocket than resting comfortably in someone else’s.”

46 .“Only when you combine sound intellect with emotional discipline, you get rational behavior.’

47. “Somebody once said that in looking to hire people, look for three qualities; Integrity, intelligence and energy. If they don’t have the first, the other two will kill you. You think about it; it’s true. If you hire somebody without the first, you really want them to be dumb and lazy.”

48. “Great investment opportunities come around when excellent companies are surrounded by unusual circumstances that cause the stock to be mis-appraised.”

49. “Never invest in a business you can’t understand.”

50. “In the short term, the market is a popularity contest. In the long term, the market is a weighing machine.”

51. ‘The critical investment factor is determining the intrinsic value of a business and paying a fair or bargain price.”

52. “Stop trying to predict the direction of the stock market, the economy or elections.”

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

54. Unless you can watch your stock holding decline 50% without becoming panic stricken, you should not be in the market.

55. “It is optimism that is the enemy of the rational buyer.”

56. “As far as you are concerned, the stock market doesn’t exist; ignore it.”

57. “The ability to say no is a tremendous advantage for an investor.”

58. “Much success can be attributed to inactivity. Most investors cannot resist the temptation to constantly buy and sell.”

59. “An investor should act as though he had a lifetime decision card with just twenty punches on it.”

60. “Wild swings in the share prices have more to do with the ‘lemming like’ behavior of institutional investors than with the aggregate returns of the company they own. As a group lemmings have a rotten image but no individual lemming has ever received bad press.”

61. “Turns around seldom turn.”

62. “The advice ‘you never go broke taking a profit’ is foolish.”

63. “Can you really explain to a fish what it’s like to walk on land? One day on land is worth a thousand years of talking about it, and one day running a business has exactly the same kind of value.”

64. “For some reason, people take their cues from price action rather than from values. What doesn’t work is when you start doing things that you don’t understand or because they worked last week for somebody else. The dumbest reason in the world to buy a stock is because it is going up. You can’t buy what is popular and do well.”

65. “The important thing is to keep playing, to play against weak opponents and to play for big stakes.”

66. “There all kinds of businesses that Charlie and I don’t understand but that doesn’t cause us to stay up at night. I just mean we go on to the next one and that’s what the individual investor should do.”

67. ‘In a bulls market, one must avoid the error of the preening duck that quacks boastfully after a torrential rainstorm thinking that its paddling skills have caused it to rise in the world. A right thinking duck would compare its position after the downpour to that of the other ducks on the pond.”

68. “Charlie and I decided long ago that in an investment lifetime, it’s too hard to make hundreds of smart decisions. That judgment became ever more compelling as Berkshire’s capital mushroomed and the universe of investments that could significantly affect our results shrank dramatically. Therefore, we adopted a strategy that required our being smart and not too smart at that, only a very few times.” Indeed, we now settle for one good idea a year.”

69. “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.”

70. “We don’t get paid for activity, just for being right. As to how long we will wait; we will wait indefinitely.”

71. “All day you wait for the pitch you like; then when the fielders are asleep, you step up and hit it.”

72. “If you understood a business perfectly and the future of the business, you need very little in the way of a margin of safety.”

73. “So the more vulnerable the business is, assuming you still want to invest in it; the larger the margin of safety you’d need. If you are 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, you may feel okay but if it’s over the Grand Canyon, you might feel you want a little larger margin of safety.”

74. “One’s objective should be to get it right, get it quick, get it out and get it over. Your problem won’t improve with age.”

75. “The future is never clear and you pay a very high price in the stock market for a cheery consensus.”

76. “Uncertainty is the friend of the buyer of long term values.”

77. “The most important quality of an investor is temperament, not intellect. You need a temperament that neither derives great pleasure from being with the crowd or against the crowd.”

78. Managers thinking about accounting issues should never forget Abraham Lincoln’s favorite riddles: ‘How many legs does a dog have if you call its tail a leg. The answer is four because calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg.