Quotes from Warren Buffett

I could improve your ultimate financial welfare by giving you a ticket with only 20 slots in it so that you had 20 punches—representing all the investments that you got to make in a lifetime. And once you'd punched through the card, you couldn't make any more investments at all. Under those rules, you'd really think carefully about what you did and you'd be forced to load up on what you'd really thought about. So you'd do so much better.

this holding has proved extraordinarily profitable thanks to a move by your Chairman that combined luck and skill—110% luck, the balance skill.

Risk comes from not knowing what you're doing.

Instead, he takes those coupons from his low-return bond and—if inclined to reinvest—looks for the highest return with safety currently available.  Good money is not thrown after bad.

During the recent depression many companies have been able to offset their operating losses by including in income profits arising from repurchases of their own bonds at a substantial discount from par. Unfortunately the credit of U. S. Steel Corporation has always stood so high that this lucrative source of revenue has not hitherto been available to it. The Modernization Scheme will remedy this condition.

The best investment you can make is in yourself.

The people who are most successful are those who are doing what they love.

If you buy things you don't need, soon you will have to sell things you need.

operating earnings plus depreciation and amortization less normalized capital expenditures—was adequate to cover both interest and modest reductions in debt.

Do not save what is left after expending, but spend what is left after saving.

Someone's sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree long ago.

Our advantage, rather, was attitude: we had learned from Ben Graham that the key to successful investing was the purchase of shares in good businesses when market prices were at a large discount from underlying business values.

In addition to being independent, directors should have business savvy, a shareholder orientation and a genuine interest in the company. The rarest of these qualities is business savvy—and if it is lacking, the other two are of little help. Many people who are smart, articulate and admired have no real understanding of business. That's no sin; they may shine elsewhere. But they don't belong on corporate boards.

Focus on the Forest — Forget the Trees Investors who evaluate Berkshire sometimes obsess on the details of our many and diverse businesses — our economic "trees," so to speak. Analysis of that type can be mind-numbing, given that we own a vast array of specimens, ranging from twigs to redwoods. A few of our trees are diseased and unlikely to be around a decade from now. Many others, though, are destined to grow in size and beauty.

The difference between successful people and very successful people is that very successful people say no to almost everything.

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. — Warren Buffett

It is not greed that drives the but envy.

Stay away from the mentality of using the credit card compulsorily and invest on yourself. Wealth has not created mankind but mankind has created wealth. Live your life in the simplest manner possible.

say, a 2:1 ratio than it is to have far greater coverage provided by a single utility. A catastrophic event can render a single utility insolvent—witness what

Each of these companies will devote its entire efforts to a single state seeking to bring the agents and insureds of its area a combination of large company capability and small company accessibility and sensitivity.

For these investors, it would have been far better if Orville had failed to get off the ground at Kitty Hawk: The more the industry has grown, the worse the disaster for owners.

We believe that a policy of portfolio concentration may well decrease risk if it raises, as it should, both the intensity with which an investor thinks about a business and the comfort-level he must feel with its economic characteristics before buying into it. In stating this opinion, we define risk, using dictionary terms, as "the possibility of loss or injury.

Our capital is underutilized now, but that will happen periodically. It's a painful condition to be in — but not as painful as doing something stupid. (I speak from experience.)

Because we are the largest lender in the manufactured homes sector and are also normally lending to lower-and-middle-income families, you might expect us to suffer heavy losses during a housing meltdown. But by sticking to old-fashioned loan policies — meaningful down payments and monthly payments with a sensible relationship to regular income — Clayton has kept losses to acceptable levels. It has done so even though many of our borrowers have had negative equity for some time.