The best Warren Buffett quotes includes pearls of wisdom about investments, success, and wealth.
A down-to-earth business icon with an eye for fascinating and marveling investments, Warren Buffet remains one of the best financial minds of his generation.
Known for his ridiculously profitable investments, Warren Buffet is one of the faces of the Benjamin Graham school of value investing methodology.
The Benjamin Method, which Buffett bases his investment on, is not unconnected to the immense fortune Buffet has accumulated for himself.
From his early twenties, Buffet, who attended the various ivy league financial institutions, such as the New York Institute of Finance (NYIF), began perfecting his investment portfolio to boost his financial wits.
Now 90 years old, Buffet spent decades perfecting his investment philosophy, which has seen him emerge as one of the world’s richest men.
He purchased securities with unjustifiable low prices that have the potential to rise, thanks to his intrinsic worth.
During the covid-19 pandemic, Warren Buffet was at the top of the list of billionaires whose wealth increased at an alarming rate, though he suffered a year-end decline, from which he has gracefully rebounded.
Buffett, who is worth $109 billion (as of May 2021), has always embraced the opportunity to share practical wisdom on how to increase wealth through investments.
Key Takeaways
- Think long-term investment.
- During periods of fear, be greedy; during periods of greed, be fearful.
- Master the rules of the game every day.
- Be a contrarian.
Warren Buffett Quotes About Investing & Stocks
1. “The key to investing is not assessing how much an industry is going to affect society, or how much it will grow, but rather determining the competitive advantage of any given company and, above all, the durability of that advantage.”
2. “If you aren’t willing to own a stock for ten years, don’t even think about owning it for ten minutes.”
3. “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.”
4. “Do not take yearly results too seriously. Instead, focus on four or five-year averages.”
5. “All there is to investing is picking good stocks at good times and staying with them as long as they remain good companies.”
6. “Buy a stock the way you would buy a house. Understand and like it such that you’d be content to own it in the absence of any market.”
7. “The stock market is a no-called-strike game. You don’t have to swing at everything — you can wait for your pitch.”
8. “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.”
9. “It’s been an ideal period for investors: A climate of fear is their best friend. Those who invest only when commentators are upbeat end up paying a heavy price for meaningless reassurance.”
10. “It’s better to have a partial interest in the Hope diamond than to own all of a rhinestone.”
11. “One thing that could help would be to write down the reason you are buying a stock before your purchase. Write down “I am buying Microsoft at $300 billion because…” Force yourself to write this down. It clarifies your mind and discipline.”
12. “One can best prepare themselves for the economic future by investing in your own education. If you study hard and learn at a young age, you will be in the best circumstances to secure your future.”
13. “The most important investment you can make is in yourself.”
14. “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.”
15. “You are neither right nor wrong because the crowd disagrees with you. You are right because your data and reasoning are right.”
16. “Never invest in a business you cannot understand.”
17. “Buy into a company because you want to own it, not because you want the stock to go up.”
18. “Risk comes from not knowing what you’re doing.”
19. “The best chance to deploy capital is when things are going down.”
20. “Predicting rain doesn’t count, building the ark does.”
21. “Success in investing doesn’t correlate with IQ … what you need is the temperament to control the urges that get other people into trouble in investing.”
22. “The most important quality for an investor is temperament, not intellect. You need a temperament that neither derives great pleasure from being with the crowd or against the crowd.”
24. “Lose money for the firm, and I will be understanding. Lose a shred of reputation for the firm, and I will be ruthless.”
25. “It is a terrible mistake for investors with long-term horizons — among them pension funds, college endowments, and savings-minded individuals — to measure their investment ‘risk’ by their portfolio’s ratio of bonds to stocks,”
26. “Cash … is to a business as oxygen is to an individual: never thought about when it is present, the only thing in mind when it is absent”
27. “In the business world, the rearview mirror is always clearer than the windshield.”
28. “Read 500 pages like this every day. That’s how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest. All of you can do it, but I guarantee not many of you will do it.”
29. “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.”
30. “Investors should remember that excitement and expenses are their enemies.”
Warren Buffett Quotes About Life, Business & Wise Decisions
31. “You only have to be able to evaluate companies within your circle of competence. The size of that circle is not very important; knowing its boundaries, however, is vital.”
32. “Diversification is a protection against ignorance. It makes very little sense for those who know what they’re doing.”
33. “If you buy things you do not need, soon you will have to sell things you need.”
34. “Because if you’re wrong and rates go to 2 percent, which I don’t think they will, you pay it off. It’s a one-way renegotiation. It is an incredibly attractive instrument for the homeowner and you’ve got a one-way bet.”
35. “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.”
36. “When stock can be bought below a business’s value it is probably the best use of cash.”
35. “It is not necessary to do extraordinary things to get extraordinary results.”
36. “Many management (teams) are just deciding they’re gonna buy X billions over X months. That’s no way to buy things. You buy when selling for less than they are worth. … It’s not a complicated equation to figure out whether it is beneficial or not to repurchase shares.”
37. “Half of all coin-flippers will win their first toss; none of those winners has an expectation of profit if he continues to play the game.”
38. “Keep things simple and don’t swing for the fences. When promised quick profits, respond with a quick “no.”
39. “Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.”
40. “Rule No. 1 is never lose money. Rule No. 2 is never forget Rule No. 1.”
41. “What we learn from history is that people don’t learn from history.”
42. “What is smart at one price is stupid at another.”
43. “It is not necessary to do extraordinary things to get extraordinary results.”
44. “I have no views as to where it (gold) will be, but the one thing I can tell you is it won’t do anything between now and then except look at you. Whereas, you know, Coca-Cola will be making money, and I think Wells Fargo will be making a lot of money, and there will be a lot — and it’s a lot — it’s a lot better to have a goose that keeps laying eggs than a goose that just sits there and eats insurance and storage and a few things like that.”
45. “Wall Street is the only place that people ride to in a Rolls Royce to get advice from those who take the subway.”
46. “Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.”
47. “The most important thing to do if you find yourself in a hole is to stop digging.”
48. “Lose money for the firm, and I will be understanding. Lose a shred of reputation for the firm, and I will be ruthless.”
49. “Nothing sedates rationality like large doses of effortless money.”
Warren Buffett Quotes About Timely Investments
50. “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.”
51. “Beware the investment activity that produces applause; the great moves are usually greeted by yawns.”
52. “All there is to invest is picking good stocks at good times and staying with them as long as they remain good companies.”
53. “When we own portions of outstanding businesses with outstanding managements, our favourite holding period is forever.”
54. “What investors then need is an ability to both disregard mob fears or enthusiasms and to focus on a few simple fundamentals. A willingness to look unimaginative for a sustained period — or even to look foolish — is also essential.”
55. “The rich invest in time, the poor invest in money.”
56. “The biggest mistake is not learning the habit of saving properly.” 57. “Opportunities come infrequently. When it rains gold, put out the bucket, not the thimble. (Seize Great Opportunities and Load Up the Truck)”
58. “Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.” .
59. “Every saint has a past. Every sinner has a future.”
60. “What the wise do in the beginning, fools do in the end.”
Warren Buffett Quotes About Opportunity
61. “The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything.”
62. “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.”
63. “Performance comes, performance goes. Fees never falter.”
64. “By periodically investing in an index fund, for example, the know-nothing investor can actually outperform most investment professionals. Paradoxically, when ‘dumb’ money acknowledges its limitations, it ceases to be dumb.”
65. “The only value of stock forecasters is to make fortune tellers look good.”
66. “If a business does well, the stock eventually follows.”
67. “You shouldn’t own common stocks if a 50% decrease in their value in a short period of time would cause you acute distress.”
68. “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 OK.”
69. “Never depend on a single income. Make an investment to create a second source.”
70. “Whether we’re talking about socks or stocks, I like buying quality merchandise when it is marked down.”
71. “Since I know of no way to reliably predict market movements, I recommend that you purchase Berkshire shares only if you expect to hold them for at least five years. Those who seek short-term profits should look elsewhere.”
72. “Beware the investment activity that produces applause; the great moves are usually greeted by yawns.”
73. “People always ask me where they should go to work, and I always tell them to go to work for whom they admire the most.”
74. “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.”
75. “It’s far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price.”
76. “The business schools reward difficult complex behaviour more than simple behaviour, but simple behaviour is more effective.”
77. “We always live in an uncertain world. What is certain is that the United States will go forward over time. (Trust in the United States Of America, America is the best stock market to invest in and you can be sure that your money will be safe here.)”
78. “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.”
79. “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 Money Management & Time
80. “Nothing sedates rationality like large doses of effortless money.”
81. “Time is the friend of the wonderful company, the enemy of the mediocre. (Only Invest In Wonderful Companies)”
82. “One can best prepare themselves for the economic future by investing in your own education. If you study hard and learn at a young age, you will be in the best circumstances to secure your future.”
83. “Games are won by players who focus on the playing field—not by those whose eyes are glued to the scoreboard. If you instead focus on the prospective price change of a contemplated purchase, you are speculating. There is nothing improper about that. I know, however, that I am unable to speculate successfully, and I am skeptical of those who claim sustained success at doing so.”
84. “All the commercial push is behind telling you that you ought to think about doing something today that’s different than you did yesterday. You don’t have to do that. You just have to sit back and let American industry do its job for you.”
85. “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.”
86. “Investing is an activity in which consumption today is foregone in an attempt to allow greater consumption at a later date.”
87. “I will say this about gold. If you took all the gold in the world, it would roughly make a cube 67 feet on a side…Now for that same cube of gold, it would be worth at today’s market prices about $7 trillion – that’s probably about a third of the value of all the stocks in the United States…For $7 trillion…you could have all the farmland in the United States, you could have about seven Exxon Mobils (XOM) and you could have a trillion dollars of walking-around money…And if you offered me the choice of looking at some 67 foot cube of gold and looking at it all day, and you know me touching it and fondling it occasionally…Call me crazy, but I’ll take the farmland and the Exxon Mobils.”
88. “Never give up searching for the job that you are passionate about.”
89. “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”
90. “Remember that the stock market is a manic depressive. (Always stay rational.)”
91. “When trillions of dollars are managed by Wall Streeters charging high fees, it will usually be the managers who reap outsized profits, not the clients.”
92. “Don’t watch the market closely, If they’re trying to buy and sell stocks, and worry when they go down a little bit … and think they should maybe sell them when they go up, they’re not going to have very good results.”
93. “Don’t get caught up with what other people are doing. Being a contrarian isn’t the key but being a crowd follower isn’t either. You need to detach yourself emotionally.”
94. “If returns are going to be 7 or 8 percent and you’re paying 1 percent for fees, that makes an enormous difference in how much money you’re going to have in retirement.”
95. “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.”
96. “There seems to be some perverse human characteristic that likes to make easy things difficult.”
97. “Our favorite holding period is forever.”
98. “Honesty is a very expensive gift. Don’t expect it from cheap people.”
99. “Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.”
100. “I will tell you how to become rich. Close the doors. Be fearful when others are greedy. Be greedy when others are fearful.”
To Wrap Up
The greatest Warren Buffett quotes includes sayings and words of wisdom that could motivate you to succeed.
Buffett owes his success to patient and timely investments, as well as constant evolutionary learnings about the stock market.
To be successful, patience, timely investments, prudent management, and the will to learn more about the changing system of your industry are the right armors you have to be equipped with.
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