American Business magnate
110+ Warren Buffett Quotes: Investing Wisdom from the Oracle of Omaha
Updated: by Quotlr.com Team
Warren Buffett is an American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist. He is considered one of the most successful investors in the world and has a net worth of over $85 billion. He is the chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, which owns more than 60 companies, including GEICO, Duracell, and Dairy Queen. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Warren Buffett on investing, life, success.
- Born
- August 30, 1930
- Known as
- American Business magnate
Top 10 Warren Buffett Quotes
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1.
Someone's sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.
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2.
If you don't find a way to make money while you sleep, you will work until you die.
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3.
The best investment you can make, is an investment in yourself... The more you learn, the more you'll earn.
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4.
Do not save what is left after spending, but spend what is left after saving.
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5.
Read 500 pages every day. That's how knowledge works. It builds up like compound interest.
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6.
Successful Investing takes time, discipline and patience. No matter how great the talent or effort, some things just take time: You can't produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant.
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7.
Honesty is a very expensive gift. Don't expect it from cheap people.
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8.
The Happiest people DO NOT necessarily have the BEST THINGS. They simply APPRECIATE the things they have.
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9.
We don't have to be smarter than the rest. We have to be more disciplined than the rest.
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10.
Rule No.1: Never lose money. Rule No.2: Never forget rule No.1.
Warren Buffett Image Quotes
Warren Buffett Short Quotes
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Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.
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Risk comes from not knowing what you're doing.
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I don’t look to jump over 7-foot bars I look around for 1-foot bars that I can step over.
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There seems to be some perverse human characteristic that likes to make easy things difficult.
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Other guys read Playboy. I read annual reports.
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I always knew I was going to be rich. I don't think I ever doubted it for a minute.
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When you combine ignorance and leverage, you get some pretty interesting results.
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Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.
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Wide diversification is only required when investors do not understand what they are doing.
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The secret to happiness is having low expectations.
Warren Buffett Quotes About Investing
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If you buy things you do not need, soon you will have to sell things you need.
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I think you should read everything you can. In my case, by the age of 10, I'd read every book in the Omaha public library about investing, some twice. You need to fill your mind with various competing thoughts and decide which make sense.
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Never depend on single income. Make investment to create a second source.
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Always associate yourself with people who are better than you.
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No matter how great the talent or efforts, some things just take time.
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The greatest investment a young person can make is in their own education, in their own mind. Because money comes and goes. Relationships come and go. But what you learn once stays with you forever.
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The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything.
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You can't produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant.
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Only when you combine sound intellect with emotional discipline do you get rational behavior.
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Never ask a barber if you need a haircut.
Warren Buffett Quotes About Life
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You only have to do a very few things right in your life so long as you don't do too many things wrong.
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I insist on a lot of time being spent, almost every day, to just sit and think. That is very uncommon in American business.
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You’ve gotta keep control of your time, and you can’t unless you say no. You can’t let people set your agenda in life.
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Life is like a snowball. The important thing is finding wet snow and a really long hill.
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When forced to choose, I will not trade even a night's sleep for the chance of extra profits.
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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.
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If you want to soar like an eagle in life, you can't be flocking with the turkeys.
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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 read and think. So I do more reading and thinking, and make less impulse decisions than most people in business. I do it because I like this kind of life.
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In the world of business, the people who are most successful are those who are doing what they love.
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Never do anything in life if you would be ashamed of seeing it printed on the front page of your hometown newspaper for your friends and family to see.
Warren Buffett Quotes About Success
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The key to success is emotional stability.
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When asked how he became so successful in investing, Buffett answered: 'we read hundreds and hundreds of annual reports every year.
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Diversification is a protection against ignorance. It makes very little sense for those who know what they're doing.
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Very successful people say no to almost everything.
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To be successful, you should concentrate on the world of companies, not arcane accounting mathematics.
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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.
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You don't need to be a rocket scientist. Investing is not a game where the guy with the 160 IQ beats the guy with 130 IQ.
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The best investment you can make is in yourself.
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When investing, pessimism is your friend, euphoria the enemy.
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Much success can be attributed to inactivity. Most investors cannot resist the temptation to constantly buy and sell.
Warren Buffett Quotes About Money
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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.
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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.
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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.
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We continue to make more money when snoring than when active.
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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.
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Whether we’re talking about socks or stocks, I like buying quality merchandise when it is marked down.
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Our approach is very much profiting from lack of change rather than from change. With Wrigley chewing gum, it's the lack of change that appeals to me. I don't think it is going to be hurt by the Internet. That's the kind of business I like.
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Gold has two significant shortcomings, being neither of much use nor procreative.
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Investing is simple, but not easy.
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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.
Warren Buffett Quotes About Love
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When people tell me they've learned from experience, I tell them the trick is to learn from other people's experience.
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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.
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Never give up searching for the job that you're passionate about.
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Making money isn't the backbone of our guiding purpose; making money is the by-product of our guiding purpose. If you're doing something you love, you're more likely to put your all into it, and that generally equates to making money
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Don't look for the money - look for something you love, and if you're good, the money will come.
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I measure success by how many people love me. And the best way to be loved is to be lo veable.
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When you're associating with the people that you love, doing what you love, it doesn't get any better than that.
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I tell college students, when you get to be my age you will be successful if the people who you hope to have love you, do love you.
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... not doing what we love in the name of greed is very poor management of our lives.
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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.
Warren Buffett Quotes About Leadership
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It's almost impossible to overpay the truly extraordinary CEO... but the species is rare.
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If you gave me $100 billion and said take away the soft drink leadership of Coca-Cola in the world, I'd give it back to you and say it can't be done.
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When the president of the United States goes out at, you know, 8:00 o'clock in the morning and then his own party votes gets him 2 to 1 in the house, you know that somehow a message isn't getting out. It takes real leadership.
Warren Buffett Quotes About Saving
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Well, I think the biggest mistake is not learning the habits of saving properly early. Because saving is a habit. And then, trying to get rich quick. It's pretty easy to get well-to-do slowly. But it's not easy to get rich quick.
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Taking jobs to build up your resume is the same as saving up sex for old age.
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I think you are out of your mind if you keep taking jobs that you don't like because you think it will look good on your resume. Isn't that a little like saving up sex for your old age?
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It's nice to have a lot of money, but you know, you don't want to keep it around forever. I prefer buying things. Otherwise, it's a little like saving sex for your old age.
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If I were the treasury secretary or head of the Fed, you know, I would try to scare the hell the out of the private sector and say, you better save this because you're going down with the ship.
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Resolution Trust Company was set up to liquidate a bunch of assets that the government had inherited because the savings and loans went broke.
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I asked him what he wanted to do for his career, and he replied that he wanted to go into a particular field, but thought he should work for McKinsey for a few years first to add to his resume. To me that's like saving sex for your old age. It makes no sense.
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I’ve worked in an economy that rewards someone who saves the lives of others on a battlefield with a medal, rewards a great teacher with thank-you notes from parents, but rewards those who can detect the mispricing of securities with sums reaching into the billions.
Warren Buffett Quotes About Integrity
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In looking for people to hire, look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence and energy. And if they don't have the first, the other two will kill you.
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Charlie [Munger] and I are not big fans of resumes. Instead, we focus on brains, passion and integrity.
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Look for 3 things in a person. Intelligence, Energy, & Integrity. If they don't have the last one, don't even bother with the first two.
Warren Buffett Quotes About Real Estate
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Never count on making a good sale. Have the purchase price be so attractive that even a mediocre sale gives good results.
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I really like my life. I've arranged my life so that I can do what I want.
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We will reject interesting opportunities rather than over-leverage our balance sheet.
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When we went crazy, and we did go crazy on residential real estate, it set things in motion that just - the dominoes started toppling.
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I would say the biggest single cause was we had an incredible residential real estate bubble.
Warren Buffett Quotes About Investment
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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.
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Uncertainty is the friend of the buyer of long term values.
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Games are won by players who focus on the playing field -- not by those whose eyes are glued to the scoreboard.
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First come the innovators, then come the imitators, then come the idiots.
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Investment students need only two well-taught courses - How to Value a Business and How to Think About Market Prices
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I am a better investor because I am a businessman, and a better businessman because I am no investor.
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In investing, just as in baseball, to put runs on the scoreboard, one must watch the playing field, not the scoreboard.
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Buy companies with strong histories of profitability and with a dominant business franchise.
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What the wise do in the beginning, fools do in the end.
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Cash combined with courage in a time of crisis is priceless.
Warren Buffett Quotes About Philanthropy
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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.
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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.
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On his Giving Pledge philanthropy: The way I got the message out was to get a copy of FORBES, look down that 400 list and start making phone calls! Bill and Melinda [Gates] did the same thing. So keep publishing the list so I can milk it.
Warren Buffett Quotes About People
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Wall Street is the only place that people ride to in a Rolls Royce to get advice from those who take the subway.
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There are three kinds of people: 1. Innovators. 2. Imitators. 3. Idiots.
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It's better to hang out with people better than you. Pick out associates whose behavior is better than yours and you'll drift in that direction.
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It's good to learn from your mistakes. It's better to learn from other people's mistakes.
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People will always try to stop you from doing the right thing if it is unconventional.
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We only want to link up with people whom we like, admire, and trust. ... We do not wish to join with managers who lack admirable qualities, no matter how attractive the prospects of their business. We've never succeeded in making a good deal with a bad person.
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People tend to underestimate low-probability events when they haven’t happened recently, and overestimate them when they have happened recently - that is the nature of the human animal.
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If past history was all there was to the game, the richest people would be librarians.
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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.
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The best way in my view is to just buy a low-cost index fund and keep buying it regularly over time, because you'll be buying into a wonderful industry, which in effect is all of American industry... People ought to sit back and relax and keep accumulating over time.
Warren Buffett Quotes About Business
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Accounting is the language of business.
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It's far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price.
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In business, I look for economic castles protected by unbreachable 'moats'.
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I'll tell you why I like the cigarette business. It cost a penny to make. Sell it for a dollar. It's addictive. And there's a fantastic brand loyalty.
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We don't get paid for being busy, we get paid for being right.
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Managers and investors alike must understand that accounting numbers are the beginning, not the end, of business valuation.
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The reaction of weak management to weak operations is often weak accounting.
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The true investor welcomes volatility ... a wildly fluctuating market means that irrationally low prices will periodically be attached to solid businesses.
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If you've got the power to raise prices without losing business to a competitor, you've got a very good business. And if you have to have a prayer session before raising the price by a tenth of a cent, then you've got a terrible business. I've been in both, and I know the difference.
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If a business does well, the stock eventually follows.
Warren Buffett Quotes About Years
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It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently.
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Only buy something that you'd be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years.
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You have to buy businesses and you have to buy them at attractive prices. And you have to buy into good businesses. That advice will be the same a hundred years from now. That’s what it’s all about.
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A low-cost index fund is the most sensible equity investment for the great majority of investors. My mentor, Ben Graham, took this position many years ago, and everything I have seen since convinces me of its truth.
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I never attempt to make money on the stock market. I buy on the assumption that they could close the market the next day and not reopen it for five years.
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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.
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The best business returns are usually achieved by companies that are doing something quite similar today to what they were doing five or ten years ago.
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I checked the actuarial tables, and the lowest death rate is among six-year-olds. So I decided to eat like a six-year-old.
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Over the years, a number of very smart people have learned the hard way that a long string of impressive numbers multiplied by a single zero always equals zero.
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If you are not willing to own a stock for 10 years, do not even think about owning it for 10 minutes.
Warren Buffett Quotes About Stock
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The stock market is a wonderfully efficient mechanism for transferring wealth from the impatient to the patient.
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Stop trying to predict the direction of the stock market, the economy or elections.
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I try to buy stock in businesses that are so wonderful that an idiot can run them. Because sooner or later, one will.
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Many stock options in the corporate world have worked in exactly that fashion: they have gained in value simply because management retained earnings, not because it did well with the capital in its hands.
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Great investment opportunities come around when excellent companies are surrounded by unusual circumstances that cause the stock to be misappraised.
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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.
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Market prices for stocks fluctuate at great amplitudes around intrinsic value but, over the long term, intrinsic value is virtually always reflected at some point in market price.
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All there is to investing is picking good stocks at good times and staying with them as long as they remain good companies.
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Buy into a company because you want to own it, not because you want the stock to go up.
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You shouldn't own common stocks if a 50 per cent decrease in their value in a short period of time would cause you acute distress.
Warren Buffett Famous Quotes And Sayings
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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.
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There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.
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We simply attempt to be fearful when others are greedy and to be greedy only when others are fearful.
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Asking for financial advice from a financial planner is like asking a barber if you need a hair cut.
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Outstanding long-term results are produced primarily by avoiding dumb decisions, rather than by making brilliant ones.
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Energy deregulation will be the largest transfer of wealth in history.
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I will do anything that is basically covered by the law to reduce Berkshire's tax rate. For example, on wind energy, we get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That's the only reason to build them. They don't make sense without the tax credit.
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The best asset is your own self. You can become to an enormous degree the person you want to be
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Do not put all your eggs in one basket.
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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
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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.
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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.
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In the 20th century, the United States endured two world wars and other traumatic and expensive military conflicts; the Depression; a dozen or so recessions and financial panics; oil shocks; a flu epidemic; and the resignation of a disgraced president. Yet the Dow rose from 66 to 11,497.
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My friends and I have been coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress.
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Only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked.
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Derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction.
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Everybody's got a different circle of competence. The important thing is not how big the circle is. The important thing is staying inside the circle.
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it's a good idea to review past mistakes before committing new ones.
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The smartest side to take in a bidding war is the losing side.
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OUR leaders have asked for “shared sacrifice.” But when they did the asking, they spared me. I checked with my mega-rich friends to learn what pain they were expecting. They, too, were left untouched.
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But 300 million Americans, their lending institutions, their government, their media, all believed that house prices were going to go up consistently. And that got billed into a $20 trillion residential home market. Lending was done based on it, and everybody did a lot of foolish things.
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I don't have my diploma from the University of Nebraska hanging on my office wall, and I don't have my diploma from Columbia up there either-but I do have my Dale Carnegie graduation certificate proudly displayed.
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Look at market fluctuations as your friend rather than your enemy; profit from folly rather than participate in it.
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A bull market is like sex. It feels best just before it ends.
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Things you like to do should be a hobby of yours, but things the world does should be a business of yours.
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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.'
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Knowing the edge of your competency is important. If you think you know more than you do, you will get in trouble.
Life Lessons by Warren Buffett
- Warren Buffett emphasizes the importance of taking calculated risks and learning from mistakes, as well as the value of patience and discipline in investing.
- He also emphasizes the importance of having a long-term vision and staying focused on the goal, as well as the need to be frugal and live within one's means.
- Finally, he encourages people to be generous and to give back to the community, as well as to invest in oneself through education and learning.
Cite this page · Portrait: Mark Hirschey, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
