Warren Buffett Quotes

The first rule of an investment is don’t lose. And the second rule of an investment is don’t forget the first rule. And that’s all the rules there are. ¹

To be fearful when others are greedy and to be greedy only when others are fearful.²

Life is like a snowball. The important thing is finding wet snow and a really long hill.³

The trick is to have a very long hill, which means either starting very young or living … to be very old.⁴

It’s far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price.⁵

When you combine ignorance and leverage, you get some pretty interesting results.

I’ve seen more people fail because of liquor and leverage – leverage being borrowed money. You really don’t need leverage in this world much. If you’re smart, you’re going to make a lot of money without borrowing.

Never bet against America.⁶

Our favourite holding period is forever.

I often recommend low-cost S&P 500 index funds, but only a few humble friends would believe me. Hardly any of the extremely wealthy investors, fund managers, and pension funds actually followed my advice, and they politely thanked me. But the turnaround was persuaded by asset management managers who charged high management fees to choose another way of investing.⁷

Address whatever you feel your weaknesses are, and do it now.⁸

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.⁸

If you are working with a small sum of money … and are willing to do the work, there is no question that you will find some things that promise very large returns compared to what we will be able to deliver with large sums of money.⁴

If you’re going to do dumb things because your stock goes down, then you shouldn’t own stock at all.⁴

Diversification is a protection against ignorance. It makes very little sense for those who know what they’re doing.⁴

Rational people don’t risk what they have and need for what they don’t have and don’t need.⁹

Q: My question is, if you had to pick one stock to bet on, and be resilient in the inflation, which would you choose? And what specifically enables that stock to do very well in what might very likely be a difficult market?

Warren Buffett: Well, I’ll tell you something even better than that one stock. Maybe we’ll get to one stock. But the best thing you can do is to be exceptionally good at something. If you’re the best doctor in town, if you’re the best lawyer in town, if you’re the best whatever it may be, no matter whether people are paying you with a zillion dollars or paying with, they’re going to give you some of what they produce in exchange for what you deliver. And, if you’re the one they pick out to do any particular activity, sing, or play baseball, or be their lawyer, whatever it may be, whatever abilities you have can’t be taken away from you, they can’t actually be inflated away from you. Somebody else will give you some of the wheat they produce, or the cotton, or whatever it may be, and they will trade you for the skill you have. So, the best investment by far is anything that develops yourself. And, again, it’s not taxed. So, that’s what I would do.

Charlie Munger: I got some advice for you, too. When you have your own retirement account, and your friendly advisor suggests you put all the money into bitcoin, just say no.

Warren Buffett: Nobody can take away from you the talent you have. And the truth is that the world will always be willing. They’ll need to do something, and some people will not have skills, and they will get less of a product of the society than somebody who has other skills. And sometimes that has something to do with education, but a good bit of the time it doesn’t have anything to do with education.⁸ But, just figure out what you’d like to be, and figure out how, and what you’d like to be is what you’re going to likely to be good at, and, you know, the world will always need somebody on that tube to tell us what’s going on. So, you know, study Becky Quick¹⁰ or somebody and, figure out, you know, what makes her good. And what you sort of naturally bring to the game. I mean, I could have, who’s the guy that says you’ve got to spend 10,000 hours doing this or that, Malcolm Gladwell¹¹. Malcolm Gladwell, you know, would say, just spend 10,000 hours on something. Well, I could have spent 10,000 hours trying to become a heavyweight boxer, but I don’t think I would’ve felt very good at the end of the 10,000 hours. And, you know, you stumble into what you really like doing, what you’re good at, and what is useful to society. And then it doesn’t make any difference what the dollar bill, you know, is now worth, in terms of the purchasing power, a cent, or a half-a-cent, or a hundredth of a cent. If you’re the best doctor in town, they’ll bring you chickens, whatever they may do, but they can’t take it away from you. And my guess is that, if you’ve come to five meetings, you know, you’ve got a very good future ahead of you. I mean, that shows, it self-selects, I mean. So, if you want to sell a piece of yourself, you know, we’ll buy that as the best investment we can make, we’ll take 10% of your future earnings, and we’ll give you a cash payment now. And, you know, we’ll have a terrific asset. And you can have 100% of your future earnings. And if you develop your talent, maybe you’ll be a great dancer, people pay money to watch great dancers. We had Fred Astaire and his sister, Adele, that came from Omaha, you know. Their name was Austerlitz then, but they could dance. And Adele did whatever she did with him, moved to England. And Fred Astaire went on to do a whole bunch of other things. And Ginger Rogers had to do it all the same, backwards, in high heels, and she didn’t get paid as much because she was a woman. But you’re going to do just fine. I’d bet a lot of money on you.¹²¹³

Jeff Bezos: Your style of investing is so simple. Why doesn’t everyone just copy you?

Warren Buffett: Because nobody wants to get rich slowly.¹⁴

At this point, a report card from me is appropriate: In 58 years of Berkshire management, most of my capital-allocation decisions have been no better than so-so. In some cases, also, bad moves by me have been rescued by very large doses of luck. (Remember our escapes from near-disasters at USAir and Salomon? I certainly do.) Our satisfactory results have been the product of about a dozen truly good decisions—that would be about one every five years—and a sometimes-forgotten advantage that favors long-term investors such as Berkshire.

…

The weeds wither away in significance as the flowers bloom. Over time, it takes just a few winners to work wonders.¹⁵

Q: … I have a question, it’s not really related to intrinsic value or any of that stock stuff, but more on houses. I’m still quite young, I don’t have a house yet, and I’m thinking about buying a house someday soon. And in order to do that, I’m going to have to put a down payment, which means I might have to sell my shares. And I was wondering if you can provide some insight on when is the best time to buy a house, and how much down payment you should be putting down, in relation to interest rates, and also in relation to available cash in the stock market.¹⁶

Warren Buffett: Well, Charlie’s gonna give you an answer to that in a second. I’ll just relay one story which was when I got married we did have about \$ 10,000 starting off and I told Susie, I said now, you know there’s two choices, it’s up to you. We can either buy a house which will use up all my capital and clean me out, and it’ll be like a carpenter who’s had his tools taken away from him. Or what you can let me work on this and someday, who knows, maybe I’ll even buy a little bit larger house it would otherwise be the case. So she was very understanding on that point and we waited until 1956, we got married 1952, and I decided to buy a house when it was about when the down payment was about 10% or so my net worth because I really felt I want to use the capital for other purposes. But that was a way different environment in terms of what was available to buy. In effect, if you have the house you want to buy, you know, I definitely believe in just going out and probably getting the job done. But I, in effect, probably making something in the area of a 7 or 8% investment implicitly when you do it so, you know, you’ll have to figure out your own equation from that. Charlie probably has better advice on that. He’s a big homeowner. In both senses of the word.

Charlie Munger: I think the time to buy a house is when you need one.

Warren Buffett: And when you need one?

Charlie Munger: Well, I have a very old fashioned ideas on that too. The single people I don’t care if they ever get a house.

Warren Buffett: Why when do you need one of you’re married, Charlie, I’ll follow up here for this. You need one when your wife wants one.

Charlie Munger: Yeah, yeah. I think you’ve got that exactly right.

Tariffs are actually, we’ve had a lot of experience with them. They’re an act of war, to some degree … Over time, they are a tax on goods. I mean, the tooth fairy doesn’t pay ’em! And then what? You always have to ask that question in economics. You always say, ‘And then what?’¹⁷¹⁸