Quotes from Warren Buffett

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

Gold] gets dug out of the ground in Africa, or someplace. Then we melt it down, dig another hole, bury it again and pay people to stand around guarding it. It has no utility. Anyone watching from Mars would be scratching their head.

Investors should be skeptical of history-based models. Constructed by a nerdy-sounding priesthood using esoteric terms such as beta, gamma, sigma and the like, these models tend to look impressive. Too often, though, investors forget to examine the assumptions behind the models. Beware of geeks bearing formulas.

You know ... you keep doing the same things and you keep getting the same result over and over again.

Do not save what is left after spending; instead spend what is left after saving.

Wall Street is the only place that people drive to in a Rolls Royce to take advice from people who ride the subway.

The most important investment you can make is in yourself.

Diversification is protection against ignorance. It makes little sense if you know what you are doing.

If you aren't thinking about owning a stock for ten years, don't even think about owning it for ten minutes.

So smile when you read a headline that says "Investors lose as market falls." Edit it in your mind to "Disinvestors lose as market falls—but investors gain." Though writers often forget this truism, there is a buyer for every seller and what hurts one necessarily helps the other. (As they say in golf matches: "Every putt makes someone happy.")

A public-opinion poll is no substitute for thought.

An investor should act as though he had a lifetime decision card with just twenty punches on it.

In the long run managements stressing accounting appearance over economic substance usually achieve little of either.

If past history was all that is needed to play the game of money, the richest people would be librarians.

A horse that can count to ten is a remarkable horse—not a remarkable mathematician.

We don't have to be smarter than the rest. We have to be more disciplined than the rest.

If you buy things you do not need, soon you will have to sell things you need.

I try to invest in businesses that are so wonderful that an idiot can run them. Because sooner or later, one will.

Intensity is the price of excellence.

Writing a check separates a commitment from a conversation.

I won't close down a business of subnormal profitability merely to add a fraction of a point to our corporate returns. I also feel it inappropriate for even an exceptionally profitable company to fund an operation once it appears to have unending losses in prospect. Adam Smith would disagree with my first proposition and Karl Marx would disagree with my second; the middle ground is the only position that leaves me comfortable.

I don't look to jump over 7-foot bars: I look around for 1-foot bars that I can step over.

It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently.

calling someone who trades actively in the market an investor "is like calling someone who repeatedly engages in one-night stands a romantic.