Warren Buffett
110 quotes
Biography
Warren Edward Buffett is an American investor and philanthropist who is the chairman and former CEO of the conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway. As a result of his success, Buffett is one of the best-known investors in the world.
"Basically, when you get to my age, you'll really measure your success in life by how many of the people you want to have love you actually do love you."
"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."
"Someone is sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago."
"If you’re in the luckiest one per cent of humanity, you owe it to the rest of humanity to think about the other 99 per cent."
"The rich are always going to say that, you know, just give us more money and we'll go out and spend more and then it will all trickle down to the rest of you. But that has not worked the last 10 years, and I hope the American public is catching on."
"Risk comes from not knowing what you're doing"
"The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything."
"You only have to do a very few things right in your life so long as you don't do too many things wrong."
"I call investing the greatest business in the world ... because you never have to swing. You stand at the plate, the pitcher throws you General Motors at 47! U.S. Steel at 39! and nobody calls a strike on you. There's no penalty except opportunity lost. All day you wait for the pitch you like; then when the fielders are asleep, you step up and hit it."
"In my view, for most people, the best thing to do is to own the S&P 500 index fund. People will try and sell you other things because there’s more money in it for them if they do. And I’m not saying that that’s a conscious act on their part. Most good salespeople believe their own baloney."
"You're dealing with a lot of silly people in the marketplace; it's like a great big casino and everyone else is boozing. If you can stick with Pepsi, you should be O.K."
"Draw a circle around the businesses you understand and then eliminate those that fail to qualify on the basis of value, good management and limited exposure to hard times. ... Buy into a company because you want to own it, not because you want the stock to go up. ... People have been successful investors because they've stuck with successful companies. Sooner or later the market mirrors the business."
"Love is the greatest advantage a parent can give."
"I'll tell you why I like the cigarette business. ... It costs a penny to make. Sell it for a dollar. It's addictive. And there's fantastic brand loyalty."
"Never count on making a good sale. Have the purchase price be so attractive that even a mediocre sale gives good results."
"I like thinking big. I always have. To me it's very simple: if you're going to be thinking anyway, you might as well think big."
"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."
"I don't have a problem with guilt about money. The way I see it is that my money represents an enormous number of claim checks on society. It is like I have these little pieces of paper that I can turn into consumption. If I wanted to, I could hire 10,000 people to do nothing but paint my picture every day for the rest of my life. And the GNP would go up. But the utility of the product would be zilch, and I would be keeping those 10,000 people from doing AIDS research, or teaching, or nursing. I don't do that though. I don't use very many of those claim checks. There's nothing material I want very much. And I'm going to give virtually all of those claim checks to charity when my wife and I die."
"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..."
"Wall Street is the only place that people ride to work in a Rolls Royce to get advice from those who take the subway."
"Investors making purchases in an overheated market need to recognize that it may often take an extended period for the value of even an outstanding company to catch up with the price they paid."
"We don't get paid for activity, just for being right. As to how long we'll wait, we'll wait indefinitely."
"Success in investing doesn't correlate with I.Q. once you're above the level of 125. Once you have ordinary intelligence, what you need is the temperament to control the urges that get other people into trouble in investing."
"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."
"The best thing that happens to us is when a great company gets into temporary trouble... We want to buy them when they're on the operating table."