Inspirational Quotes by Warren Buffett
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I tell college students, when you get to be my age you will be successful if the people who you hope to have love you, do love you.

There is seldom just one cockroach in the kitchen. You know, you turn on the light and, all of sudden, they all start scurrying around.

I've argued with the senators and congressmen I've talked to. You don't want to be too little too late. If you buy them at the right price, you may be buying two trillion of face value.

I don't read economic forecasts. I don't read the funny papers.

Forecasts usually tell us more of the forecaster than of the forecast.

How do you beat Bobby Fischer? You play him at any game but chess. I try to stay in games where I have an edge.

Good profits simply are not inconsistent with good behavior.

Fear is the foe of the faddist, but the friend of the fundamentalist.

Goldman Sachs saying they might be interested in such an investment. I'm familiar with the company. I've known the management, the current management, Jack Welch before Jeff Immelt. I've known him for decades.

I have a house that I bought 55 years ago. It's warm in the winter; it's cool in the summer. It has everything I wanted, plus it has all kinds of good memories. Like my kids, I have good thoughts about that. I can't imagine living any better.

Don't invest in pieces of papers, invest in great businesses underlying them.

We only want to link up with people whom we like, admire, and trust. ... We do not wish to join with managers who lack admirable qualities, no matter how attractive the prospects of their business. We've never succeeded in making a good deal with a bad person.

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.

I think any time you couple the term Wall Street with bailout or something like that, you know -- I don't like what's going on in Wall Street.

You don't ever ask a barber whether you need a haircut.

The best investment you can make, is an investment in yourself... The more you learn, the more you'll earn.

Good big decisions do not take time at all, if they do you are in trouble.

Money to some extent sometimes let you be in more interesting environments. But it can't change how many people love you or how healthy you are.

For some reason people take their cues from price action rather than from values. Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.

You can't make a good deal with a bad person.

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.

Risk is a part of God's game, alike for men and nations.

If you've been playing poker for half an hour and you still don't know who the patsy is, you're the patsy.

Never invest in a business you can't understand.

Cash never makes us happy, but it's better to have the money burning a hole in Berkshire's pocket than resting comfortably in someone else's.

Investors making purchases in an overheated market need to recognize that it may often take an extended period for the value of even an outstanding company to catch up with the price they paid.

The stock market is a no-called-strike game. You don't have to swing at everything -- you can wait for your pitch.

When asked how he became so successful in investing, Buffett answered: 'we read hundreds and hundreds of annual reports every year.

A bull market is like sex. It feels best just before it ends.

The patient that's on the floor with the cardiac arrest is not Wall Street. It's the American economy.

Do what you love and work for whom you admire the most, and you've given yourself the best chance in life you can.

The .350 hitter expects, and also deserves, a big payoff for his performance -- even if he plays for a cellar-dwelling team. And a .150 hitter should get no reward -- even if he plays for a pennant winner.

If I eat 2,700 calories a day, a quarter of that is Coca-Cola.

Diversification may preserve wealth, but concentration builds wealth.

I get to do what I like to do every single day of the year.

When you're associating with the people that you love, doing what you love, it doesn't get any better than that.

Never give up searching for the job that you're passionate about.

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 I subscribed to the efficient market theory I would still be delivering papers.

Uncertainty is the friend of the buyer of long term values.

The key to success is emotional stability.

Too often, executive compensation in the U.S. is ridiculously out of line with performance. That won't change, moreover, because the deck is stacked against investors when it comes to the CEO's pay.

If I taught a class, on my final exam I would take an Internet company and ask, 'How much is this company worth?' Anyone who would answer, I would flunk.

You don't need to have extraordinary effort to achieve extraordinary results. You just need to do the ordinary, everyday things exceptionally well.

I believe the chance of any event causing Berkshire to experience financial problems is essentially zero. We will always be prepared for the thousand-year flood; in fact, if it occurswe will be selling life jackets to the unprepared.

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.

It's important to have the right monetary policy. It's important for, to have the right fiscal policy. But it's nowhere near as important as just the normal regenerative capacity of American capitalism.

I mean Franklin Delano Roosevelt didn't -- you know, when he came in, he didn't print any money.

Do not take yearly results too seriously. Instead, focus on four or five-year averages.

I will give you two pieces of advice. Invest as much in yourself as you can; you are your own best asset by far. Then follow your passion; you want to be really excited to get out of bed every morning.

You'd get very rich if you thought of yourself as having a card with only twenty punches in a lifetime, and every financial decision used up one punch. You'd resist the temptation to dabble. You'd make more good decisions and you'd make more big decisions.

We have learned to turn out lots of goods and services, but we haven't learned as well how to have everybody share in the bounty. The obligation of a society as prosperous as ours is to figure out how nobody gets left too far behind.

If you are a professional and have confidence, then I would advocate lots of concentration.

I think the FDIC was one of the great inventions of the American.

If you have a great manager, you want to pay him very well.

If you invested in a very low cost index fund -- where you don't put the money in at one time, but average in over 10 years -you'll do better than 90% of people who start investing at the same time.

A low-cost index fund is the most sensible equity investment for the great majority of investors. My mentor, Ben Graham, took this position many years ago, and everything I have seen since convinces me of its truth.

By periodically investing in an index fund, the know-nothing investors can actually outperform most investment professionals.

The three most important words in investing...Margin of Safety.

You get what I call the natural progression, the three Is. The innovators, the imitators, and the idiots.

The critical investment factor is determining the intrinsic value of a business and paying a fair or bargain price.

Buy into a company because you want to own it, not because you want the stock to go up.

Nothing sedates rationality like large doses of effortless money.

Our approach is very much profiting from lack of change rather than from change.

The best thing that happens to us is when a great company gets into temporary trouble...We want to buy them when they're on the operating table.

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.

Investors should remember that excitement and expenses are their enemies.

It isn't given to man to be able to run a financial institution where different interest-rate scenarios will prevail on all of that so as to produce kind of smooth, regular earnings from a very large base to start with.

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.

I do not like debt and do not like to invest in companies that have too much debt, particularly long-term debt. With long-term debt, increases in interest rates can drastically affect company profits and make future cash flows less predictable.

They say the chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken. The chains you put around yourself now have enormous consequences as you go through life.

John Maynard Keynes essentially said, don't try and figure out what the market is doing. Figure out a business you understand, and concentrate.

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

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.

Businesses always have opportunities to improve service, product lines, manufacturing techniques, and the like, and obviously these opportunities should be seized. But a business that constantly encounters major change also encounters many chances for major error.

We have usually made our best purchases when apprehensions about some macro event were at a peak. Fear is the foe of the faddist, but the friend of the fundamentalist.

This economy doesn't work well without the lubrication of credit and trust.

I don't want to hold out false hopes that the -- by some magic moment, that things will turn around in a couple months because they wouldn't, Charlie. I mean, and it's a big mistake to try and mislead people.

Our stay-put behavior reflects our view that the stock market serves as a relocation center at which money is moved from the active to the patient.

I measure success by how many people love me. And the best way to be loved is to be lo veable.