I’ve compiled a selection of Buffett quotes that moderate extreme behaviors in the market and in life.
1. We don’t have to be smarter than the rest. We have to be more disciplined than the rest.
2. Predicting rain doesn’t count. Building arks does.
3. Read 500 pages every day. That’s how knowledge works. It accumulates like compound interest.
4. An investor should act as though he had a lifetime decision card with just twenty punches on it.
5. Calling someone who actively trades in the market an investor is like calling someone who repeatedly engages in one-night stands a romantic.
6. If you belong to the luckiest 1% of people, you owe it to the rest of the humanity to think about the other 99 per cent.
7. 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.
8. You can be sure that within the next ten years, you will see things that you didn’t think were possible.
9. Don’t take the annual results too seriously. Instead, focus on four- or five-year averages.
10. The most important quality for an investor is temperament, not intellect.
11. 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.
12. Widespread fear is your friend as an investor because it serves up bargain purchases.
13. For 240 years betting against America has been a terrible mistake, and now is not the time to start. American magic has always prevailed, and it will do so again.
14. 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. And the fact that a given asset has appreciated in the recent past is never a reason to buy it.
15. The most common cause of low prices is pessimism — some times pervasive, some times specific to a company or industry. We want to do business in such an environment, not because we like pessimism but because we like the prices it produces. It’s optimism that is the enemy of the rational buyer.
16. It’s nice to have a lot of money, but you know, you don’t want to keep it around forever. I prefer to buy things. Otherwise, it’s a little like saving sex for your old age.
17. After 25 years of buying and supervising a great variety of businesses, Charlie (Munger) and I have not learned how to solve difficult business problems. What we have learned is how to avoid them.
18. Never be afraid to ask too much when selling or offer too little when buying.
19. 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. That’s the ultimate test of how you have lived your life.
20. You’ve gotta keep control of your time, and you can’t unless you say no. You can’t let people set your agenda in life.
21. 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. So I do more reading and thinking, and make fewer impulse decisions than most people in business. I do it because I like this kind of life.
And I’ll end with an optimistic one:
22. Over the long term, the stock market news will be good. 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 fly epidemic; and the resignation of a disgraced president. Yet the Dow rose from 66 to 11,497 (it is now 33,737) points.
