Top 100 Buffett Quotes
#1. Trying to pick individual stocks is a trap. I can't do it. Warren Buffett can, but hardly anyone else can beat the indexes over a long period of time.
Ben Stein
#2. Warren Buffett is fond of saying that any player unaware of the fool in the market probably is the fool in the market.
Michael Lewis
#3. We both (Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett) insist on a lot of time being available almost every day to just sit and think. That is very uncommon in American business. We read and think.
Charlie Munger
#4. On traditional economic theory:
We do not play chess as if we were a grandmaster, invest as if we were Warren Buffett, or cook like an Iron Chef. It is more likely we cook like Warren Buffett, who loves to eat at Dairy Queen.
Richard H. Thaler
#5. I think Buffett is a better investor than me because he has a better eye toward what makes a great business. And when I find a great business I'm happy to buy it and hold it. Most businesses don't look so great to me.
Seth Klarman
#6. Right at the core, the mainstream has it backwards. Warren Buffett often quips that the first rule of investing is to not lose money, and the second rule is to not forget the first rule. Yet few investors approach the world with such a strict standard of risk avoidance.
Seth Klarman
#7. Warren Buffett chuckled and said to me "I hope it's not my bad habits" Good Habits once established are just as hard to break as bad habits and bad habits are easier to abandon today than tomorrow. So what are you going to do about it?
Lucas Remmerswaal
#8. The parrot eyed me cautiously, like he was forming a vague memory of unhappier times, before Jimmy Buffett and ganja.
"Noisy bastard," he decided.
Rick Riordan
#9. The bottom line is this: Cash, in modest increments, has a role in any portfolio. But unless you are Warren Buffett, you should limit it to 2 or 3 percent.
Barry Ritholtz
#11. I've been associated with Warren ( Buffett) so long, I thought I'd be just a footnote.
Charlie Munger
#12. In fact, when Warren Buffett was once asked about the key to success, he pointed to a stack of nearby books and said, "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.
Warren Buffett
#13. The pure administration of Graham-and-Doddery really needs a long-term lock-up like Warren Buffett has, or it will have occasional quite dreadful client problems.
Jeremy Grantham
#14. Buffett and Munger joke that envy is the only one of the seven deadly sins that isn't any fun. "Envy is crazy," remarks Munger. "It's 100 percent destructive. . . . If you get those things out of your life early, life works a lot better.
Guy Spier
#15. Warren Buffett pays taxes on a smaller percentage of his billions in income than his cleaning lady.
Eric Alterman
#16. Humanity is filled with beautiful and positive and powerful people who care. I'm so glad we have people like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett in the world.
Judy Collins
#17. I admire people like Warren Buffett that are donating so much money to charity.
Bethenny Frankel
#18. When Warren Buffett talks about competing against only half of the population, I think about her and wonder how different her life might have been if she had been born half a century later.
Sheryl Sandberg
#19. Who uses funds more productively - private citizens or the government? I dare say that Warren Buffett can use his surplus funds more effectively in private business and creating jobs than the government can.
Mark Skousen
#20. Nebraska was home to indigenous peoples for centuries. It became a state in 1867, and has produced an important literary figure, Willa Cather, as well as an investor said to be the world's second richest man, Warren Buffett.
Stephen Kinzer
#21. Buffett's genius was largely a genius of character - of patience, discipline, and rationality.
Roger Lowenstein
#22. I think any statement about stock prices is always suspect unless it's made by Warren Buffett.
Bill Gates
#23. As Buffett has often observed, value investing is not a concept that can be learned and gradually applied over time. It is either absorbed and adopted at once, or it is never truly learned.
Seth Klarman
#24. Warren Buffett is famous for talking about the 'intrinsic value' of stocks. But while many people parrot this phrase, few know what it really means.
Robert Kiyosaki
#25. I love whenever they downgrade a hurricane to a tropical depression, because I always think of a tropical depression as how I feel three songs into a Jimmy Buffett concert.
Andy Kindler
#26. When Warren Buffett says the sun shines out of somebody's backside, it's worth paying attention.
Guy Spier
#27. As Graham, Dodd and Buffett have all said, you should always remember that you don't have to swing at every pitch. You can wait for opportunities that fit your criteria and if you don't find them, patiently wait. Deciding not to act is still a decision.
Seth Klarman
#28. Generous people can become more generous as they become richer, giving away vast fortunes to worthwhile causes as Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are doing.
Robert Kiyosaki
#29. Buffett found it 'extraordinary' that academics studied such things. They studied what was measurable, rather than what was meaningful. 'As a friend [Charlie Munger] said, to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Roger Lowenstein
#30. I think the foundation at Berkshire [Buffett's stake in Berkshirewill pass to the Buffett Foundation upon his death] will be a plus because there will be a continuation of the culture. We'd still take in fine businesses run by people who love them.
Charlie Munger
#31. Buffett also teaches investors that there is one important caveat to the multiyear test: Underperformance in the late stages of a speculative bull market is highly likely. It's a caveat that he repeats to this day. We
Jeremy Miller
#32. All capitalists should be like Warren Buffett, and he says he should be taxed more.
Ed Asner
#33. Buffett, when he gave away his money, referenced Carnegie. He quoted from Carnegie. When he said, "The man who dies rich dies disgraced," in the 1880s, his fellow millionaires looked on him like he was a lunatic, you know, an idiot, a mad man.
David Nasaw
#34. I've adopted the guideline of Warren Buffett's partner, Charlie Munger, who says I wanna know where I'll be when I die - so I never go there.
Tom Brokaw
#35. If you look at anyone who has achieved great success and wealth, people like Warren Buffett, Oprah Winfrey, or Lance Armstrong, they have all focused intensely in order to win.
Robert Kiyosaki
#36. I love reading Warren Buffett's letters, and I love contrasting his words with his actions. He's a very wise guy.
Daniel S. Loeb
#37. Someone is sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago. - Warren Buffett
Lora M. Cecere
#38. Never test the depth of the river with both feet. - WARREN BUFFETT
Anthony Robbins
#39. Buffett himself says, Diversification is protection against ignorance. (It) makes very little sense for those who know what they're doing.
Robert T. Kiyosaki
#40. The lesson of Buffett was: To succeed in a spectacular fashion you had to be spectacularly unusual.
Michael Lewis
#41. Everybody gets ticked off about GE paying no taxes. Look, we have a complicated, convoluted tax system. And only big corporations and wealthy individuals like Warren Buffett can take advantage of it. We need to simplify and flatten the code, get rid of all the loopholes.
Joe Walsh
#42. Warren Buffett has shown you can be very, very successful without being rapacious, while still being honest, without engaging in constant legal battles.
Guy Spier
#43. I give away about 50 percent of my income, so my, you know, desire to give back to the country is pretty strong and I intend to give away a lot more. I've signed the giving pledge with Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, and I intend to give away the bulk of my money.
David Rubenstein
#44. Whatever happened to Warren Buffett, the world's their-richest man? Guilt, a feeling of being blessed by luck, forgotten lessons - who knows? In any case, Buffett now believe that government should redistribute the wealth earned by others to those who did not earn it.
Larry Elder
#45. Our partnership with the American Warren Buffett, from my perspective, is aimed at creating more jobs.
Stef Wertheimer
#46. Actually, I bought one share of Warren Buffett's stock, probably 35 years ago, in order to read his letters.
Sam Wyly
#47. Buffett does enjoy being a billionaire, but in offbeat ways. As he put it, though money cannot change your health or how many people love you, it lets you be in 'more interesting environments.
Roger Lowenstein
#48. I see friends who are in different genres of music, and they say they're so burnt playing the same stuff every night. That's why you see a country act wanting to go out and play an old classic rock song. But what cracks me up is that they all want to be Jimmy Buffett. I can't figure that out.
Kid Rock
#49. Over the time that I followed Warren Buffett, one CFO told me, it's very important to pay attention not only to what Warren Buffett says and what he actually does - often there are subtle differences between the two.
Guy Spier
#51. President Obama likes to talk about the Buffett Rule. Well, here's a Buffett Rule that all Americans should be able to support: mom and pop businesses should not pay a higher tax rate than Fortune 500 corporations like Warren Buffett's.
Rob Portman
#52. Warren Buffett said that he would not invest in any business where the owner hasn't failed at least twice. I love that truly wealthy and successful people understand that failure is part of the process.
Steve Harvey
#53. Warren Buffett's company reportedly owes the IRS a billion dollars in back taxes. When he said he wasn't paying enough taxes, he wasn't kidding.
Jay Leno
#54. When asked how he became so successful in investing, Buffett answered: 'we read hundreds and hundreds of annual reports every year.
Warren Buffett
#55. Warren Buffett once wrote that value investing is like an inoculation
it either takes or it doesn't
and when you explain to somebody what it is and how it works and why it works and show them the returns, either they get it or they don't.
Seth Klarman
#56. If the same family were always on the bottom, then you'd have big resentments. But if DuPonts go down and Pampered Chef up, [that's good]. That much churn makes people think the system is fairer. Buffett: We don't like churn now, but we liked it more 30-40 years ago.
Charlie Munger
#57. Like my friend Warren Buffett, I feel particularly lucky to do something every day that I love to do. He calls it 'tap-dancing to work.'
Bill Gates
#58. I think you'll make more money in the end with good ethics than bad. Even though there are some people who do very well, like Marc Rich-who plainly has never had any decent ethics, or seldom anyway. But in the end, Warren Buffett has done better than Marc Rich-in money-not just in reputation.
Charlie Munger
#59. This became my own goal: not to be Warren Buffett, but to become a more authentic version of myself. As he had taught me, the path to true success is through authenticity.
Guy Spier
#60. We could walk 3 minutes and be on the beach. I think the music kind of suffered because of it. It kind of smelled like Jimmy Buffett, which is a bad thing.
John Mellencamp
#61. Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have their 'Giving Pledge,' where billionaires promise to give away the majority of their wealth when they die. My Social Security Pledge is better - to give money to good causes when you are alive. Besides, more Americans can participate.
Mark Skousen
#62. It's really a question of fairness and what kind of country we're going to live in. There are 22,000 people making over $1 million. They're paying an effective tax rate in the teens. As Warren Buffett said, he pays less in taxes effectively than his secretary does. That's not right.
David Plouffe
#64. As a parent and a citizen, I'll take a Bill Gates (or Warren Buffett) over Steve Jobs every time. If we must have billionaires, better they should ignore Jobs's example and instead embrace the morality and wisdom of the great industrialist-philanthropist Andrew Carnegie.
Eric Alterman
#65. The whole market mechanism and its evolution is something that, I'm kind of of the Buffett School. You know, if I see a derivative, I run the other way.
Felix Rohatyn
#66. I don't think Warren Buffett should be the treasurer or whatever. Warren Buffett's nuts! Just because he's a freaking billionaire doesn't mean he has common sense.
Stephen Baldwin
#67. It doesn't take Warren Buffett to realize that when companies don't know what new rules will look like, it affects their ability to commit capital and create new jobs.
John Sununu
#68. Arnold Schwarzenegger has hired billionaire Warren Buffett as his senior economic advisor. And not to be outdone Gary Coleman announced his senior economic adviser will be Thurston Howell the Third.
Conan O'Brien
#69. From time to time, you have seminal personalities who really change the way the world sees itself - people like Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela. Warren Buffett is that kind of person in the business world.
Guy Spier
#70. Warren Buffett summed up the conventional view with his usual pith: "Gold gets dug out of the ground ... we melt it down, dig another hole, bury it again and pay people to stand around guarding it ... Anyone from Mars would be scratching their head."2
George Gilder
#71. When Warren Buffett invests in a company, he is conferring upon that company something very unique: his credibility.
Bethany McLean
#72. If Warren Buffett made his money from ordinary income rather than capital gains, his tax rate would be a lot higher than his secretary's. In fact a very small percentage of people in this country pay a big chunk of the taxes.
Michael Bloomberg
#73. Warren Buffett is one of the best learning machines on this earth. The turtles which outrun the hares are learning machines. If you stop learning in this world, the world rushes right by you.
Lucas Remmerswaal
#74. Warren Buffett has said many times that people either get value investing in five minutes or they won't get it in five years. So, there is something in the human brain, that for some of us, makes all the difference in the world right away and the patience it requires is part of the wiring process.
Mohnish Pabrai
#75. I have no large desire to sacrifice much of my personal habits, intellectual pleasures, and personal standards in order to become a billionaire like Warren Buffett, and I certainly do not see point of becoming one if I were to adopt Spartan (even miserly) habits and live in my starter house.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#76. One has to divide Warren Buffet into different periods. There is a continuously evolving style of Warren Buffett.
Guy Spier
#77. Bill Gates recently picked up the ukulele. And Warren Buffett is a huge ukulele fan. I even got to strum a few chords with Francis Ford Coppola. It blows my mind that these people, who have everything in the world they could want, have picked up the ukulele and found a little bit of joy.
Jake Shimabukuro
#78. Take any person, put them in the wrong environment, and they can get off to some pretty bad things. Warren Buffett has said that he would not like to get into debt because he doesn't want to discover what behavior he's capable of.
Guy Spier
#79. Eric once chatted with Warren Buffett about what he looks for when acquiring companies. His answer was: a leader who doesn't need him.
Eric Schmidt
#80. Be fearful when there is greed and be greedy when there is fear.
Warren Buffett
#83. My only contact with the outside world was an RCA Victrola, and Elvis would sing, and then I'd dream about expensive cars.
Jimmy Buffett
#84. I'm living on things that excite me, be they pastry, or lobster, or love ...
Jimmy Buffett
#85. The truth is that I've got all my net worth safely in Berkshire and I will never sell a share so there is no one more concerned about what happens after my death than I am.
Warren Buffett
#86. I think I could make you fifty percent a year on one million dollars. No, I know I could. I guarantee that.
Warren Buffett
#87. I'm always interested in understanding the math of things and understanding as much as I can about all aspects of business. And what I learn today may be useful to me two years from now. That'sreally the wonderful thing about investments is your knowledge is cumulative.
Warren Buffett
#88. If you've been playing poker for half an hour and you still don't know who the patsy is, you're the patsy.
Warren Buffett
#89. I think the worst mistake you can make in stocks is to buy or sell based on current headlines,
Warren Buffett
#90. Our leaders have asked for 'shared sacrifice.' But when they did the asking, they spared me. I checked with my mega-rich friends to learn what pain they were expecting. They, too, were left untouched.
Warren Buffett
#91. Never be afraid to ask for too much when selling or offer too little when buying.
Warren Buffett
#93. Take the job you would take if you were independently wealthy. You're going to do well at it.
Warren Buffett
#94. Honesty is a very expensive gift, Don't expect it from cheap people.
Warren Buffett
#95. The banking business is no favorite of ours. When assets are twenty times equity - a common ratio in this industry - mistakes that involve only a small portion of assets can destroy a major portion of equity. And mistakes have been the rule rather than the exception at many major banks.
Warren Buffett
#96. Someone's sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.
Warren Buffett
#97. You pay a very high price in the stock market for a cheery consensus.
Warren Buffett
#98. Great investment opportunities come around when excellent companies are surrounded by unusual circumstances that cause the stock to be misappraised.
Warren Buffett
#99. We are stronger than we think we are.
We have courage that we do not recognize until we need it.
We are equal to challenges that we haven't even imagined yet
Peter Buffett
#100. Your premium brand had better be delivering something special, or it's not going to get the business.
Warren Buffett
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
