Warren Buffett’s famous quotes covering investing, business, and life:

  • Rule No. 1: Never lose money. Rule No. 2: Never forget rule No. 1.
  • Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.
  • Be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful.
  • It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.
  • Risk comes from not knowing what you’re doing.
  • The best investment you can make is in yourself.
  • Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.
  • The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything.
  • In the business world, the rearview mirror is always clearer than the windshield.
  • Our favorite holding period is forever.
  • Honesty is a very expensive gift. Don’t expect it from cheap people.
  • Predicting rain doesn’t count. Building arks does.
  • The key to investing is determining the competitive advantage of a company and the durability of that advantage.
  • Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.
  • The investor of today does not profit from yesterday’s growth.
  • It’s far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price.
  • Only buy something that you’d be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years.
  • All there is to investing is picking good stocks at good times and staying with them as long as they remain good companies.
  • Successful investing takes time, discipline, and patience. You can’t produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant.
  • The only time to buy these is on a day with no ‘y’ in it.
  • If a business does well, the stock eventually follows.
  • No matter how great the talent or efforts, some things just take time.
  • 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.
  • It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.
  • Look at market fluctuations as your friend rather than your enemy; profit from folly rather than participate in it.
  • Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.
  • A public-opinion poll is no substitute for thought.
  • If you get to my age in life and nobody thinks well of you, I don’t care how big your bank account is, your life is a disaster.
  • 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.
  • When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact.
  • The stock market is designed to transfer money from the active to the patient.
  • Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.
  • Derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction.
  • Today people who hold cash equivalents feel comfortable. They shouldn’t. They have opted for a terrible long-term asset, one that pays virtually nothing and is certain to depreciate in value.
  • There seems to be some perverse human characteristic that likes to make easy things difficult.
  • You do things when the opportunities come along. I’ve had periods in my life when I’ve had a bundle of ideas come along, and I’ve had long dry spells. If I get an idea next week, I’ll do something. If not, I won’t do a damn thing.
  • 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.
  • 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.