Warren Buffett Quotes

if we aren't happy owning a piece of that business with the Exchange closed, we're not happy owning it with the Exchange open.

Love is the greatest advantage a parent can give.

Games are won by players who focus on the playing field –- not by those whose eyes are glued to the scoreboard.

People always ask me where they should go to work, and I always tell them to go to work for whom they admire the most.

Our performance, relatively, is likely to be better in a bear market than in a bull market ... in a year when the general market had a substantial advance, I would be well satisfied to match the advance of the averages.

An idiot with a plan can beat a genius without a plan.

Our basic principle is that if you want to shoot rare, fast-moving elephants, you should always carry a loaded gun. p217

Charlie’s dictum: “All I want to know is where I’m going to die so I’ll never go there.

I don't have a problem with guilt about money. The way I see it is that my money represents an enormous number of claim checks on society. It is like I have these little pieces of paper that I can turn into consumption. If I wanted to, I could hire 10,000 people to do nothing but paint my picture every day for the rest of my life. And the GNP would go up. But the utility of the product would be zilch, and I would be keeping those 10,000 people from doing AIDS research, or teaching, or nursing. I don't do that though. I don't use very many of those claim checks. There's nothing material I want very much. And I'm going to give virtually all of those claim checks to charity when my wife and I die.

A very low cost index fund where you don't put in all your money at one time ... If you accumulate a low cost index fund over 10 years ... with fairly regular sums, I think you will probably do better than 90% of the people around you that take up investing at a similar time.

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 small chance of distress or disgrace cannot, in our view, be offset by a large chance of extra returns.

When Charlie and I finish reading the long footnotes detailing the derivatives activities of major banks, the only thing we understand is that we don’t understand how much risk the institution is running.

Stop trying to predict the direction of the stock market, the economy, interest rates, or elections.

Every saint has a past. Every sinner has a future.