117 Inspiring Warren Buffett Quotes

If you want to accomplish something in life, one of the best ways is to study those that have already done what you’re trying to acquire. 

If one of your goals is to build wealth, look no further than Warren Buffett.  He’s considered to be one of the most successful (and famous) investors in the world, with a net worth of over $100 billion.

He’s earned the nickname the “Oracle of Omaha” as a reference to his home state of Nebraska as so many investors look to him for advice.

As a notable philanthropist, the majority of his net worth has been pledged to be given away upon his passing.

With decades of success and amazing achievements, here’s a list of my favorite Warren Buffett quotes to inspire you.

---

---

Top 117 Warren Buffett Quotes

#1  “If you don’t find a way to make money while you sleep, you will work until you die.” (one of my favorites)

#2 “A public-opinion poll is no substitute for thought.”

#3 “Basically, when you get to my age, you’ll really measure your success in life by how many of the people you want to have love you actually do love you.”

#4 “Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.”

#5 “Someone is sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.”

#6 “Rule No. 1 is never lose money. Rule No. 2 is never forget Rule No. 1.”

#7 “Price is what you pay, value is what you get.”

#8 “The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything.”

#9 “Risk comes from not knowing what you’re doing.”

#10 “It’s far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price.”

#11 “If you aren’t willing to own a stock for 10 years, don’t even think about owning it for 10 minutes.”

#12 “What we learn from history is that people don’t learn from history.”

#13 “Honesty is a very expensive gift, Don’t expect it from cheap people.”

#14 “Somebody once said that in looking for people to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. And if you don’t have the first, the other two will kill you. You think about it; it’s true. If you hire somebody without [integrity], you really want them to be dumb and lazy.”

#15 “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.”

#16 “Only buy something that you’d be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years.”

#17 “Opportunities come infrequently. When it rains gold, put out the bucket, not the thimble.”

#18 “Widespread fear is your friend as an investor because it serves up bargain purchases.“

#19 “Beware of geeks bearing formulas.”

#20 “Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.”

#21 “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.” (another of my favorites)

#22 “Risk comes from not knowing what you’re doing.”

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

#24 “We simply attempt to be fearful when others are greedy and to be greedy only when others are fearful.”

#25 “The most important thing to do if you find yourself in a hole is to stop digging.”

#26 “The most important investment you can make is in yourself.”

#27 “Read 500 pages like this every day. That’s how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest. All of you can do it, but I guarantee not many of you will do it.”

#28 “Lose money for the firm, and I will be understanding. Lose a shred of reputation for the firm, and I will be ruthless.”

#29 “The most important quality for an investor is temperament, not intellect.”

#30 “There seems to be some perverse human characteristic that likes to make easy things difficult.”

#31 “Never depend on a single income. Make an investment to create a second source.” (Passive income is key)

#32 “No matter how great the talent or efforts, some things just take time. You can’t produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant.”

#33 “I insist on a lot of time being spent, almost every day, to just sit and think. That is very uncommon in American business. I read and think. So I do more reading and thinking, and make less impulse decisions than most people in business. I do it because I like this kind of life.”

#34 “If you’re in the luckiest 1% of humanity, you owe it to the rest of humanity to think about the other 99%.”

#35 “There comes a time when you ought to start doing what you want. Take a job that you love. You will jump out of bed in the morning. I think you are out of your mind if you keep taking jobs that you don’t like because you think it will look good on your resume. Isn’t that a little like saving up sex for your old age?”

#36 “You are neither right nor wrong because the crowd disagrees with you. You are right because your data and reasoning are right.”

#37 “When we own portions of outstanding businesses with outstanding managements, our favorite holding period is forever.”

#38 “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.”

#39 “For the investor, a too-high purchase price for the stock of an excellent company can undo the effects of a subsequent decade of favorable business developments.”

#40 “Derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction.”

#41 “Economic medicine that was previously meted out by the cupful has recently been dispensed by the barrel.”

#42 “I always knew I was going to be rich. I don’t think I ever doubted it for a minute.”

#43 “Wall Street is the only place that people ride to in a Rolls Royce to get advice from those who take the subway.“

#44 “In the business world, the rearview mirror is always clearer than the windshield.”

#45 “Don’t get caught up with what other people are doing. Being a contrarian isn’t the key but being a crowd follower isn’t either. You need to detach yourself emotionally.”

#46 “Investors should remember that excitement and expenses are their enemies.”

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

#48 “You’ve gotta keep control of your time, and you can’t unless you say no. You can’t let people set your agenda in life.”

#49 “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.“

#50 “On the margin of safety, which means, don’t try and drive a 9,800-pound truck over a bridge that says it’s, you know, capacity: 10,000 pounds. But go down the road a little bit and find one that says, capacity: 15,000 pounds.”

#51 “I buy expensive suits. They just look cheap on me.”

#52 “I think that both parties should declare the debt limit as a political weapon of mass destruction which can’t be used.”

#53 “Cash… is to a business as oxygen is to an individual: never thought about when it is present, the only thing in mind when it is absent.”

#54 “If returns are going to be 7 or 8% and you’re paying 1% for fees, that makes an enormous difference in how much money you’re going to have in retirement.”

#55 “Today people who hold cash equivalents feel comfortable. They shouldn’t. They have opted for a terrible long-term asset, one that pays virtually nothing and is certain to depreciate in value.”

#56 “Time is the friend of the wonderful company, the enemy of the mediocre.”

#57 “If past history was all there was to the game, the richest people would be librarians.”

#58 “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

#59 “Should you find yourself in a chronically leaking boat, energy devoted to changing vessels is likely to be more productive than energy devoted to patching leaks.”

#60 “Over the long term, the stock market news will be good. In the 20th century, the United States endured two world wars and other traumatic and expensive military conflicts; the Depression; a dozen or so recessions and financial panics; oil shocks; a fly epidemic; and the resignation of a disgraced president. Yet the Dow rose from 66 to 11,497.”

#61 “Charlie and I would follow a buy-and-hold policy even if we ran a tax-exempt institution.”

#62 “When trillions of dollars are managed by Wall Streeters charging high fees, it will usually be the managers who reap outsized profits, not the clients.”

#63 “The best chance to deploy capital is when things are going down.”

#64 “Buy companies with strong histories of profitability and with a dominant business franchise.”

#65 “You only have to do a very few things right in your life so long as you don’t do too many things wrong.”

#66 “Never ask a barber if you need a haircut.” 🙂

#67 “Calling someone who trades actively in the market an investor is like calling someone who repeatedly engages in one-night stands a romantic.”

#68 “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.”

#69 “Speculation is most dangerous when it looks easiest.”

#70 “What the wise do in the beginning, fools do in the end.”

#71 “It’s nice to have a lot of money, but you know, you don’t want to keep it around forever. I prefer buying things. Otherwise, it’s a little like saving sex for your old age.” 🙂

#72 “Buy a stock the way you would buy a house. Understand and like it such that you’d be content to own it in the absence of any market.”

#73 “I call investing the greatest business in the world … because you never have to swing. You stand at the plate, the pitcher throws you General Motors at 47! U.S. Steel at 39! and nobody calls a strike on you. There’s no penalty except opportunity lost. All day you wait for the pitch you like; then when the fielders are asleep, you step up and hit it.”

#74 “When we own portions of outstanding businesses with outstanding managements, our favorite holding period is forever.”

#75 “For 240 years it’s been a terrible mistake to bet against America, and now is no time to start.”

#76 “If you’ve been playing poker for half an hour and you still don’t know who the patsy is, you’re the patsy.”

#77 “I could end the deficit in 5 minutes. You just pass a law that says that anytime there is a deficit of more than 3% of GDP all sitting members of congress are ineligible for reelection.”

#78 “Of the billionaires I have known, money just brings out the basic traits in them. If they were jerks before they had money, they are simply jerks with a billion dollars.”

#79 “Predicting rain doesn’t count. Building arks does.”

#80 “The best thing I did was to choose the right heroes.”

#81 “The investor of today does not profit from yesterday’s growth.”

#82 “The only time to buy these is on a day with no ‘y’ in it.”

#83 “It is a terrible mistake for investors with long-term horizons — among them pension funds, college endowments and savings-minded individuals — to measure their investment ‘risk’ by their portfolio’s ratio of bonds to stocks.”

#84 “An investor should act as though he had a lifetime decision card with just twenty punches on it.”

#85 “You do things when the opportunities come along. I’ve had periods in my life when I’ve had a bundle of ideas come along, and I’ve had long dry spells. If I get an idea next week, I’ll do something. If not, I won’t do a damn thing.”

#86 “It is not necessary to do extraordinary things to get extraordinary results.”

#87 “We’re still in a recession. We’re not gonna be out of it for a while, but we will get out.”

#88 “Your premium brand had better be delivering something special, or it’s not going to get the business.”

#89 “Time is the friend of the wonderful company, the enemy of the mediocre.”

#90 “We always live in an uncertain world. What is certain is that the United States will go forward over time.”

#91 “You don’t need to be a rocket scientist. Investing is not a game where the guy with the 160 IQ beats the guy with 130 IQ.”

#92 “Never invest in a business you cannot understand.”

#93 “It’s better to hang out with people better than you. Pick out associates whose behavior is better than yours and you’ll drift in that direction.”

#94 “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.”

#95 “Accounting is the language of business.”

#96 “When you combine ignorance and leverage, you get some pretty interesting results.”

#97 “It’s never paid to bet against America. We come through things, but its not always a smooth ride.”

#98 “I sent one e-mail in my life. I sent it to Jeff Raikes at Microsoft, and it ended up in court in Minneapolis, so I am one for one.”

#99 “If a business does well, the stock eventually follows.”

#100 “If anything, taxes for the lower and middle class and maybe even the upper middle class should even probably be cut further. But I think that people at the high end – people like myself – should be paying a lot more in taxes. We have it better than we’ve ever had it.”

Related article: 5 Outstanding Tax Strategies For High Income Earners

#101 “The smarter the journalists are, the better off society is. For to a degree, people read the press to inform themselves – and the better the teacher, the better the student body.”

#102 “If you cannot control your emotions, you cannot control your money.”

#103 “It’s good to learn from your mistakes. It’s better to learn from other people’s mistakes.”

#104 “We don’t have to be smarter than the rest. We have to be more disciplined than the rest.”

#105 “We enjoy the process far more than the proceeds.”

#106 “Risk is a part of God’s game, alike for men and nations.”

#107 “We believe that according the name ‘investors’ to institutions that trade actively is like calling someone who repeatedly engages in one-night stands a ‘romantic.’”

#108 “You do things when the opportunities come along. I’ve had periods in my life when I’ve had a bundle of ideas come along, and I’ve had long dry spells. If I get an idea next week, I’ll do something. If not, I won’t do a damn thing.”

#109 “Why not invest your assets in the companies you really like? As Mae West said, ‘Too much of a good thing can be wonderful‘.”

#110 “The greatest investment a young person can make is in their own education, in their own mind. Because money comes and goes. Relationships come and go. But what you learn once stays with you forever.”

#111 “Always invest for the long term.“

#112 “Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.”

#113 “Keep all your eggs in one basket, but watch that basket closely.”

#114 “I bought a company in the mid-’90s called Dexter Shoe and paid $400 million for it. And it went to zero. And I gave about $400 million worth of Berkshire stock, which is probably now worth $400 billion. But I’ve made lots of dumb decisions. That’s part of the game.”

#115 “We’ve used up a lot of bullets. And we talk about stimulus. But the truth is, we’re running a federal deficit that’s 9 percent of GDP. That is stimulative as all get out. It’s more stimulative than any policy we’ve followed since World War II.”

#116 “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.”

#117 “I think the most important factor in getting out of the recession actually is just the regenerative capacity of – of American capitalism.”

Join the Passive Investors Circle