Occasional outbreaks of those two super-contagious diseases, fear and greed, will forever occur in the investment community. The timing of these epidemics is equally unpredictable, both as to duration and degree. Therefore we never try to anticipate the arrival or departure of either. We simply attempt to be fearful when others are greedy and to be greedy only when others are fearful.

You need a temperament that neither derives great pleasure from being with the crowd or against the crowd.

Unless you can watch your stock holding decline by 50% without becoming panic stricken, you should not be in the stock market.

Sound investing can make you very wealthy if you're not in too big of a hurry. And it never makes you poor, which is even better.

Look at market fluctuations as your friend rather than your enemy... profit from folly rather than participate in it.

We don't get paid for activity, just for being right. As to how long we'll wait, we'll wait indefinitely.

Do not try to catch a falling knife until you have a handle on the risk.

Success in investing doesn't correlate with IQ once you're above the level of 125. Once you have ordinary intelligence, what you need is the temperament to control the urges that get other people into trouble in investing.

Buy stocks like you buy your groceries, not like you buy your perfume.

The most common cause of low prices is pessimism - sometimes pervasive, sometimes 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.

If you don't know jewelry, know the jeweler.

We do not view the company itself as the ultimate owner of our business assets, but instead view the company as a conduit through which our shareholders own assets.

I really like my life. I've arranged my life so that I can do what I want.

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.

The time to get interested is when no one else is. You can't buy what is popular and do well.

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

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

If a business does well, the stock eventually follows.

The stock market is designed to transfer money from the active to the patient.

Cash combined with courage in a crisis is priceless.

Buy a business, don't rent stocks.

Time is the friend of the wonderful company, the enemy of the mediocre.

For investors as a whole, returns decrease as motion increases.

A pin lies in wait for every bubble and when the two eventually meet, a new wave of investors learns some very old lessons.

Your goal as an investor should be to purchase, at a rational price, a part interest in an easily-understandable business whose earnings are virtually certain to be materially higher five, ten and twenty years from now. Over time, you will find only a few companies that meet these standards - so when you see one that qualifies, you should buy a meaningful amount of stock. You must also resist temptation to stray from your guidelines: If you aren't willing to own a stock for ten years, don't even think about owning it for ten minutes.

You should invest in a business that even a fool can run, because someday a fool will.

Risk comes from not knowing what you're doing.

Wide diversification is only required when investors do not understand what they are doing. Diversification may preserve wealth, but concentration builds wealth.

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.

If you are a know-something investor, able to understand business economics and to find five to ten sensibly priced companies that possess important long-term competitive advantages, conventional diversification makes no sense to you.

Earnings should only be retained [as opposed to being paid out as dividends] when there is a reasonable prospect that for ever dollar retained by the corporation, at least one dollar of market value will be created for owners. This will happen only if the capital retained produces incremental earnings equal to, or above, those generally available to investors.

If Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan were to whisper to me what his monetary policy was going to be over the next two years, it wouldn't change one thing I do.

I look for businesses in which I think I can predict what they're going to look like in ten to fifteen years time. Take Wrigley's chewing gum. I don't think the internet is going to change how people chew gum.

I read annual reports of the company I'm looking at and I read the annual reports of the competitors - that is the main source of material.

We read hundreds and hundreds of annual reports every year.

Equities will almost certainly outperform cash over the next decade, probably by a substantial degree. Those investors who cling now to cash are betting they can efficiently time their move away from it later. In waiting for the comfort of good news, they are ignoring Wayne Gretzky’s advice: “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it has been.”

"How do you feel?" Forbes asked.
"Like an oversexed guy in a whorehouse. Now is the time to invest and get rich."

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

There's very little money to be made recommending our strategy [buy and hold]. Your broker would starve to death. Recommending something to be held for 30 years is a level of self-sacrifice you'll rarely see in a monastery, let alone a brokerage house.

The fact that people will be full of greed, fear, or folly is predictable.

Whenever I read about some company undertaking a cost-cutting program, I know it's not a company that really knows what costs are about. The really good manager does not wake up in the morning and say "This is the day I'm going to cut costs", any more than he wakes up and decides to practice breathing.

You only have to do a very few things right in your life so long as you don't do too many things wrong.

Full-time professionals in other fields, let's say dentists, bring a lot to the layman. But in aggregate, people get nothing for their money from professional money managers.

If you gave me $100 billion and said take away the soft drink leadership of Coca-Cola in the world, I'd give it back to you and say it can't be done.

You go to bed feeling very comfortable just thinking about two and a half billion males with hair growing while you sleep. No one at Gillette has trouble sleeping.

It's a huge structural advantage not to have a lot of money. I think I could make you 50% a year on $1 million. No, I know I could. I guarantee that.

We have embraced the 21st century by entering such cutting-edge industries as brick, carpet, insulation and paint. Try to control your excitement.

When the whorehouse burns down, even the pretty girls have to run out.

We believe that according the name "investor" to institutions that trade actively is like calling someone who repeatedly engages in one-night stands a "romantic".

Charlie and I continue to believe that short-term market forecasts are poison and should be kept locked up in a safe place, away from children and also from grown-ups who behave in the market like children.

I like to go for cinches. I like to shoot fish in a barrel. But I like to do it after the water has run out.

If you expect to be a net saver during the next five years, should you hope for a higher or lower stock market during that period? Many investors get this one wrong. Even though they are going to be net buyers of stocks for many years to come, they are elated when stock prices rise and depressed when they fall. This reaction makes no sense. Only those who will be sellers of equities in the near future should be happy at seeing stocks rise. Prospective purchasers should much prefer sinking prices.

You're neither right nor wrong because other people agree with you. You're right because your facts are right and your reasoning is right, and that's the only thing that makes you right. And if your facts and reasoning are right, you don't have to worry about anybody else.

When you combine ignorance with leverage you get some pretty interesting results.

The dumbest reason in the world to buy a stock is because it's going up.

Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.

In the insurance business, there is no statute of limitation on stupidity.

My idea of a group decision is to look in the mirror.