Best Investment Quotes

"Rule No. 1: Never lose money. Rule No. 2: Never forget rule No. 1."

"In the short run, the market is a voting machine, but in the long run, it is a weighing machine."

"The big money is not in the buying and selling, but in the waiting."

"Wide diversification is only required when investors do not understand what they are doing."

"Price is what you pay. Value is what you get."

"The four most dangerous words in investing are: 'This time it's different.'"

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

"The stock market is like baseball. You don't have to swing at every pitch. You can wait for the fat one."

"Be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful."

"Margin of safety is the difference between the intrinsic value of a stock and its market price."

"Time is the friend of the wonderful business, the enemy of the mediocre."

"When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact."

"To buy when others are despondently selling and to sell when others are greedily buying requires the greatest fortitude and pays the greatest reward."

"Risk comes from not knowing what you're doing."

"In business, I look for economic castles protected by unbreachable moats."

"The pendulum between euphoria and depression, between optimism and pessimism, makes short-term results extremely unpredictable."

"The investor's chief problem - and even his worst enemy - is likely to be himself."

"Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it; he who doesn't, pays it."

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

"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."

"I think I agree with Ben Graham. He didn't like to speak with management because he thought he would be influenced by what they said."

"You can waste a whole lot of energy running all over the country checking on managements of the companies you own. We only go to annual meetings if they're within a 20-block radius of the office."

"It is very difficult to run a one-man firm without anybody to talk to about things. Lots of times, your ideas may make sense to you but they really need somebody else to talk them out. I don't know who else I'd talk to about them."

"Concentrate on what you know and forget about everything else."

"One of the things people are most foolish about is that they think the market price of a stock on a per share basis reflects the total price of the company."

"But in many cases where the sons and the fathers do get along, the sons do much better than the fathers."

"And Dave Dodd, the late co-author of Security Analysis, said to me when the stock was way down, 'I've always lectured at my course at Columbia, 'Don't let paying taxes affect your judgement of when to sell.' And I didn't follow my own advice.' He had 125,000 shares of GEICO. And when it went up, he didn't sell it because he didn't want to pay the taxes."

"Templeton’s worst ten years investment‑wise were his first ten years. And you told me that the same was true for you. I think the first ten years you get kind of acquainted with what you’re doing."

"You have to understand accounting and you have to understand the nuances of accounting. It's the language of business and it's an imperfect language, but unless you are willing to put in the effort to learn accounting - how to read and interpret financial statements - you really shouldn't select stocks yourself."

"I like people admitting they were complete stupid horses’ asses. I know I’ll perform better if I rub my nose in my mistakes. This is a wonderful trick to learn."

"Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when you woke up. Discharge your duties faithfully and well. Systematically you get ahead, but not necessarily in fast spurts. Nevertheless, you build discipline by preparing for fast spurts. Slug it out one inch at a time, day by day. At the end of the day – if you live long enough – most people get what they deserve."

“There isn’t a single formula. You need to know a lot about business and human nature and the numbers… It is unreasonable to expect that there is a magic system that will do it for you."

"It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent."

"Frequently, years of patience are rewarded in a single year."

"Although it's easy to forget sometimes, a share of a stock is not a lottery ticket. It's part ownership of a business."

"When it comes to predicting the market, the important skill is not listening, but snoring. The trick is not to learn to trust your gut feelings, but rather to discipline yourself to ignore them."

"In my books, I’ve always placed the emphasis on the importance of the management team in selecting companies… and yet, I didn’t do it enough."

"You know, Wall Street focuses on lots of unimportant things. But the quality of the management makes up 90 to 120% of the success of a business. Investors think with a such a short term horizon but in the end, management is the key factor."

"I want to know: Who is working on the things that others are barely aware of? I want companies that welcome dissent, rather than stifle it, that don't penalize people who criticize what management is doing."

"Money is made by sitting, not trading."

"Character: the virtue of hard times."

"Only those who are asleep make no mistakes."

"A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing."

"Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new."

"All men make mistakes. But only wise men do learn from their mistakes."

"If we are in the right path, the only thing left to do is to keep walking."

"The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is today."

“Knowledge without wisdom is a load of books on the back of an ass.”

"Wealth is the product of Man's capacity to think."

"The mob has many heads, but no brains."

"I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious."

"You have to read a zillion corporate annual reports and their financial statements."

“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.”

“There is a huge difference between the business that grows and requires lots of capital to do so and the business that grows and doesn’t require capital.”

"I have stressed management, but even so, I haven't stressed it enough. It is the most important ingredient."

"My greatest and perhaps only strength was in hiring people smarter than I was."

"If you're an exec, and you sit in your office and you ask someone below you for a report, what do you think it's going to say? 'Things are going great! When do I get my bonus?'"

"Time is Our Friend. Responsibility and Due Diligence Are Our Pillars."

"What is the merit of ink and paper without thought?"

"The universe is full of wonderful answers patiently waiting for us to ask the right questions."

"Some men read Playboy. I read annual reports."