Warren Buffett's quotes [1001+ ] (Part 3)

Warren Buffett’s quotes- Part 3

Warren Edward Buffett (born August 30, 1930) is an American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist. He is currently the chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway. He is considered one of the most successful investors in the world^] and has a net worth of over $102.1 billion as of December 2021, making him the world’s tenth-wealthiest person.

“If the reason for doing something is that everyone else is doing it, it’s not a good enough reason.” – Warren Buffett

“I never try to predict the market.” – Warren Buffett

“The stockmarket is a semi-psychotic creature given to extremes of elation and despair.” – Warren Buffett

“Buy companies with strong histories of profitability and with a dominant business franchise.” – Warren Buffett

“I like to buy things I can understand. I do a lot of research on things.” – Warren Buffett

“The big question about how people behave is whether they’ve got an Inner Scorecard or an Outer Scorecard. It helps if you can be satisfied with an Inner Scorecard.” – Warren Buffett

“[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.” – Warren Buffett

“The capital gains tax is 15 percent now. So I sit there in my office and I make a lot of money by capital gains, and I pay 15 percent, and I pay no payroll tax on it.” – Warren Buffett

“None of this means, however, that a business or stock is an intelligent purchase simply because it is unpopular; a contrarian approach is just as foolish as a follow-the-crowd strategy. What’s required is thinking rather than polling. Unfortunately, Bertrand Russell’s observation about life in general applies with unusual force in the financial world: “Most men would rather die than think. Many do.”” – Warren Buffett

“Games are won by players who focus on the playing field — not by those whose eyes are glued to the scoreboard.” – Warren Buffett

“I would say the most satisfying thing actually is watching my three children each pick up on their own interests and work many more hours per week than most people that have jobs at trying to intelligently give away that money in fields that they particularly care about.” – Warren Buffett

“It’s much easier to stay out of trouble now than to get out of trouble later.” – Warren Buffett

“The stock market is a no-called-strike game. You don’t have to swing at everything – you can wait for your pitch.” – Warren Buffett

“The Happiest people DO NOT necessarily have the BEST THINGS.

“Stop trying to predict the direction of the stock market, the economy or elections.” – Warren Buffett

“I checked the actuarial tables, and the lowest death rate is among six-year-olds. So I decided to eat like a six-year-old.” – Warren Buffett

“Investing in yourself is the best thing you can do. If you’ve got talents, no one can take them from you.” – Warren Buffett

“Generally speaking, investing in yourself is the best thing you can do. Anything that improves your own talents; nobody can tax it or take it away from you. They can run up huge deficits and the dollar can become worth far less. You can have all kinds of things happen. But if you’ve got talent yourself, and you’ve maximized your talent, you’ve got a tremendous asset that can return ten-fold.” – Warren Buffett

“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.” – Warren Buffett

“We have to live with the rest of the world. And it’s a mistake, in my view. Trade has generally developed in this country. We actually export 12 or 13 percent of our GDP. It was only 5 percent in 1970. But it benefits us. It benefits the rest of the world. It doesn’t benefit the steelworker maybe in Ohio. And that’s the problem that has to be addressed, because when you have something that’s good for society, but terribly harmful for given individuals, we have got to make sure those individuals are taken care of.” – Warren Buffett

“In fact, in my adult lifetime, I don’t think I’ve ever seen people as fearful economically as they are right now.” – Warren Buffett

“If you get to my age in life and nobody thinks well of you, I don’t care how big your bank account is, your life is a disaster.” – Warren Buffett

“Writing checks to the IRS that include strings of zeros does not bother me … Overall, we feel extraordinarily lucky to have been dealt a hand in life that enables us to write large checks to the government rather than one requiring the government to regularly write checks to us-say, because we are disabled or unemployed.” – Warren Buffett

“You will be right, over the course of many transactions, if your hypotheses are correct, your facts are correct, and your reasoning is correct. True conservatism is only possible through knowledge and reason.” – Warren Buffett

“I have an 800 freephone number now that I call if I get the urge to buy an airline stock. I call at two in the morning and I say: “My name is Warren and I’m an aeroholic.” And then they talk me down.” – Warren Buffett

“You have to turn over a lot of rocks to find those little anomalies. You have to find the companies that are off the map – way off the map.” – Warren Buffett

“Taking jobs to build up your resume is the same as saving up sex for old age.” – Warren Buffett

“If you’ve got the power to raise prices without losing business to a competitor, you’ve got a very good business. And if you have to have a prayer session before raising the price by a tenth of a cent, then you’ve got a terrible business. I’ve been in both, and I know the difference.” – Warren Buffett

“A bull market is like sex. It feels best just before it ends.” – Warren Buffett

“When you get to my age, you’ll 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’ve lived your life.” – Warren Buffett

“That’s been lost. It’s a huge problem. What you have is you have the major institutions of the world all wanting to deleverage. They want to take down their assets and liabilities. What seemed so easy to borrow against a year ago now looks like rat poison to them. So they’re trying to deleverage. There is only one institution in the world that can leverage up in a way that’s all a countervailing force to that, and that’s the United States Treasury.” – Warren Buffett

Warren Buffett’s quotes- Part 3

“You could be somewhere where the mail was delayed three weeks and do just fine investing.” – Warren Buffett

“Lethargy bordering on sloth remains the cornerstone of our investment style. The exception was Wells Fargo, a superbly-managed, high-return banking operation in which we increased our ownership to just under 10%, the most we can own without the approval of the Federal Reserve Board.” – Warren Buffett

“An investor needs to do very few things right as long as he or she avoids big mistakes.” – Warren Buffett

“You ought to be able to explain why you’re taking the job you’re taking, why you’re making the investment you’re making, or whatever it may be. And if it can’t stand applying pencil to paper, you’d better think it through some more. And if you can’t write an intelligent answer to those questions, don’t do it.” – Warren Buffett

“It’s us fun being a horse when the tractor comes along, or the blacksmith when the car comes along.” – Warren Buffett

“A contrarian approach is just as foolish as a follow-the-crowd strategy. What’s required is thinking rather than polling.” – Warren Buffett

“… the best way to own common stocks is through an index fund.” – Warren Buffett

“Ben’s Mr. Market allegory may seem out-of-date in today’s investment world, in which most professionals and academicians talk of efficient markets, dynamic hedging and betas. Their interest in such matters is understandable, since techniques shrouded in mystery clearly have value to the purveyor of investment advice. After all, what witch doctor has ever achieved fame and fortune by simply advising ‘Take two aspirins’?” – Warren Buffett

“Investment students need only two well-taught courses – How to Value a Business and How to Think About Market Prices” – Warren Buffett

“Very successful people say no to almost everything.” – Warren Buffett

“In an inflationary world, a toll bridge (like company) would be a great thing to own because you’ve laid out the capital costs. You built it in old dollars and you don’t have to keep replacing it.” – Warren Buffett

“Emotional makeup is more important than technical skill” – Warren Buffett

“The problem with commodities is that you are betting on what someone else would pay for them in six months. The commodity itself isn’t going to do anything for you….it is an entirely different game to buy a lump of something and hope that somebody else pays you more for that lump two years from now than it is to buy something that you expect to produce income for you over time.” – Warren Buffett

“We look for things I can understand. A lot of businesses I don’t understand.” – Warren Buffett

“I’m just lucky to have been in the right place at the right time. Another place, another time, I wouldn’t have been as successful. Society enabled me to make my money and my money should go to society.” – Warren Buffett

“We like to buy businesses, but we don’t like to sell them.” – Warren Buffett

“The most important investment you can make is in yourself. Very few people get anything like their potential horsepower translated into the actual horsepower of their output in life. Potential exceeds realization for many people…The best asset is your own self. You can become to an enormous degree the person you want to be.” – Warren Buffett

“Personally, I really hope I can treat everyone equally. I think I have done a pretty good job so far but I know I can do it better.” – Warren Buffett

“Over the years, Charlie [Munger, Berkshire Hathaway Vice Chairman] and I have observed many accounting-based frauds of staggering size. Few of the perpetrators have been punished; many have not even been censured. It has been far safer to steal large sums with pen than small sums with a gun.” – Warren Buffett

“I am out of step with present conditions. When the game is no longer played your way, it is only human to say the new approach is all wrong, bound to lead to trouble, and so on. On one point, however, I am clear. I will not abandon a previous approach whose logic I understand ( although I find it difficult to apply ) even though it may mean foregoing large, and apparently easy, profits to embrace an approach which I don’t fully understand, have not practiced successfully, and which possibly could lead to substantial permanent loss of capital.” – Warren Buffett

“We have long felt that the only value of stock forecasters is to make fortune-tellers look good.” – Warren Buffett

“We try to exert a Ted Williams kind of discipline. In his book The Science of Hitting, Ted explains that he carved the strike zone into 77 cells, each the size of a baseball. Swinging only at balls in his “best” cell, he knew, would allow him to bat .400; reaching for balls in his “worst” spot, the low outside corner of the strike zone, would reduce him to .230. In other words, waiting for the fat pitch would mean a trip to the Hall of Fame; swinging indiscriminately would mean a ticket to the minors.” – Warren Buffett

“You really don’t need leverage in this world much. If you’re smart, you’re going to make a lot of money without borrowing. I’ve never borrowed a significant amount of money in my life. Never. Never will. I’ve got no interest in it.” – Warren Buffett

“Just imagine living on 21,000 a year. I mean you have 20 percent of the population doing that. So you don’t have to worry about guys like me.” – Warren Buffett

“I’ve never believed in risking what my family and friends have and need in order to pursue what they don’t have and don’t need.” – Warren Buffett

“All but a few of the organizations do not specifically promise to deliver superior investment performance although it is perhaps not unreasonable for the public to draw such an inference from their advertised emphasis on professional management.” – Warren Buffett

“What’s hot today isn’t likely to be hot tomorrow. The stock market reverts to fundamental returns over the long run. Don’t follow the herd.” – Warren Buffett

“Read 500 pages every day. That’s how knowledge works. It builds up like compound interest.” – Warren Buffett

“Does the business have favourable long term prospects?” – Warren Buffett

“In some corner of the world they are probably still holding regular meetings of the Flat Earth Society. We derive no comfort because important people, vocal people, or great numbers of people agree with us. Nor do we derive comfort if they don’t.” – Warren Buffett

“I spend twelve hours a week – a little over 10% of my waking hours – playing the game. Now I am trying to figure out how to get by on less sleep in order to fit in a few more hands.” – Warren Buffett

“More investment sins are probably committed by otherwise quite intelligent people because of “tax considerations” than from any other cause. One of my friends-a noted West Coast philosopher-maintains that a majority of life’s errors are caused by forgetting what one is really trying to do. This is certainly the case when an emotionally supercharged element like taxes enters the picture (I have another friend-a noted East Coast philosopher who says it isn’t the lack of representation he minds-it’s the taxation).” – Warren Buffett

“Writing a check separates a commitment from a conversation.” – Warren Buffett

“Investing requires qualities of temperament way more than it requires qualities of intellect.” – Warren Buffett

“If you don’t know jewelry, know the jeweler.” – Warren Buffett

“Managers and investors alike must understand that accounting numbers are the beginning, not the end, of business valuation.” – Warren Buffett

“Sound investing can make you very wealthy if you’re not in too big a hurry” – Warren Buffett

“Do not put all your eggs in one basket.” – Warren Buffett

“Whether we’re talking about socks or stocks, I like buying quality merchandise when it is marked down.” – Warren Buffett

“Can you know you can have institutions that put curbs on that in various ways, and actually what the banks, you know, they have various capital ratios and that sort of thing, but the banks got around them, I mean, they set up sieves and that sort of thing just to get more leverage. People love leverage when it’s working. I mean, it’s so easy to borrow money from a guy at X and put it out at X.” – Warren Buffett

“It is unquestionably true that the investment companies have their money more conventionally invested than we do. To many people conventionality is indistinguishable from conservatism. In my view, this represents erroneous thinking. Neither a conventional nor an unconventional approach, per se, is conservative.” – Warren Buffett

“I’ve read about all the sales today. If you’re an auto dealer, you’re feeling it. If you’re a furniture retailer like we are, you’re feeling it. If you’re a jewelry retailer, you’re feeling it. I know some of these businesses because we’re in them. Yeah, it’s being felt, but it will be felt big time more if we don’t do something about it, what’s going on.” – Warren Buffett

“Of our 49 billion, we haven’t moved any to Bitcoin” – Warren Buffett

“Diversification is a protection against ignorance. It makes very little sense for those who know what they’re doing.” – Warren Buffett

“We do not have, nor have had, and never will have an opinion about where the stock market, interest rates, or business activity will be a year from now.” – Warren Buffett

“Buy a cross section of American industry, and if a cross section of American industry doesn’t work, certainly trying to pick the little beauties here and there isn’t going to work either.” – Warren Buffett

“Never do anything in life if you would be ashamed of seeing it printed on the front page of your hometown newspaper for your friends and family to see.” – Warren Buffett

“Bull markets and Bear markets can obscure mathematical laws, they cannot repeal them.” – Warren Buffett

“It takes 150 years to build an investment bank and only five minutes to convince you to sell me preferred stock in it at a 10% interest rate.” – Warren Buffett

“Never get too hung up on mistakes.” – Warren Buffett