Warren Buffett, born in 1930, is a highly successful American investor, business magnate, and philanthropist. Renowned as the “Oracle of Omaha,” Buffett is the chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, a conglomerate he transformed from a textile company into a diversified giant. His investment philosophy emphasizes long-term value investing, focusing on solid fundamentals rather than market timing. Buffett’s annual letters to shareholders are widely studied for insights on business and investing. Despite immense wealth, he maintains a famously frugal lifestyle. In 2006, Buffett committed to donating the majority of his wealth to philanthropy, primarily through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, influencing other billionaires to follow suit through the Giving Pledge. His principles and wisdom continue to be a source of inspiration for investors globally.
Warren Buffett Quotes
1. “If you don’t find a way to make money while you sleep, you will work until you die.”
— Warren Buffett
2. “The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything.”
— Warren Buffett
3. “Honesty is a very expensive gift. Don’t expect it from cheap people.”
— Warren Buffett
4. “Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.”
— Warren Buffett
5. “Risk comes from not knowing what you’re doing.”
— Warren Buffett
6. “Games are won by players who focus on the playing field – not by those whose eyes are glued to the scoreboard.”
— Warren Buffett
7. “Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.”
— Warren Buffett
8. “Be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful.”
— Warren Buffett
9. “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that you’ll do things differently.”
— Warren Buffett
10. “I always knew I was going to be rich. I don’t think I ever doubted it for a minute. ”
— Warren Buffett
11. “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.”
— Warren Buffett
12. “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.”
— Warren Buffett
13. “Opportunities come infrequently. When it rains gold, put out the bucket, not the thimble.”
— Warren Buffett
14. “The most important thing to do if you find yourself in a hole is to stop digging.”
— Warren Buffett
15. “You only have to do a very few things right in your life so long as you don’t do too many things wrong.”
— Warren Buffett
16. “Wall Street is the only place that people drive to in a Rolls Royce to take advice from people who ride the subway.”
— Warren Buffett
17. “You can’t produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant.”
— Warren Buffett
18. “In the business world, the rearview mirror is always clearer than the windshield.”
— Warren Buffett
19. “We don’t have to be smarter than the rest. We have to be more disciplined than the rest.”
— Warren Buffett
20. “Rule No. 1: Never lose money. Rule No. 2: Never forget Rule No. 1.”
— Warren Buffett
21. “If you cannot control your emotions, you cannot control your money.”
— Warren Buffett
22. “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.”
— Warren Buffett
23. “Accounting is the language of business.”
— Warren Buffett
24. “It’s good to learn from your mistakes. It’s better to learn from other people’s mistakes.”
— Warren Buffett
25. “There seems to be some perverse human characteristic that likes to make easy things difficult. ”
— Warren Buffett
26. “Investing in yourself is the best thing you can do. If you’ve got talents, no one can take them from you.”
— Warren Buffett
27. “Always invest for the long term.”
— Warren Buffett
28. “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.”
— Warren Buffett
29. “Never ask a barber if you need a haircut.”
— Warren Buffett
30. “If you aren’t thinking about owning a stock for ten years, don’t even think about owning it for ten minutes.”
— Warren Buffett
31. “If you buy things you do not need, soon you will have to sell things you need.”
— Warren Buffett
32. “Never depend on single income. Make investment to create a second source.”
— Warren Buffett
33. “In the world of business, the people who are most successful are those who are doing what they love.”
— Warren Buffett
34. “Keep all your eggs in one basket, but watch that basket closely.”
— Warren Buffett
35. “What the wise do in the beginning, fools do in the end.”
— Warren Buffett
36. “Life is like a snowball. The important thing is finding wet snow and a really long hill. ”
— Warren Buffett
37. “If past history was all that is needed to play the game of money, the richest people would be librarians.”
— Warren Buffett
38. “The best investment you can make is in yourself.”
— Warren Buffett
39. “An investor should act as though he had a lifetime decision card with just twenty punches on it.”
— Warren Buffett
40. “A public-opinion poll is no substitute for thought.”
— Warren Buffett
41. “Forecasts may tell you a great deal about the forecaster; they tell you nothing about the future.”
— Warren Buffett
42. “We all make mistakes. If you can’t make mistakes, you can’t make decisions. I’ve made a lot bigger mistakes myself.”
— Warren Buffett
43. “What we learn from history is that people don’t learn from history.”
— Warren Buffett
44. “I learned to go into business only with people whom I like, trust, and admire.”
— Warren Buffett
45. “You never know who’s swimming naked until the tide goes out.”
— Warren Buffett
46. “I am not a businessman, I am an artist.”
— Warren Buffett
47. “Don’t pass up something that’s attractive today because you think you will find something way more attractive tomorrow.”
— Warren Buffett
48. “If book knowledge made great investors, than the librarians would all be rich.”
— Warren Buffett
49. “The first rule is not to lose. The second rule is not to forget the first rule.”
— Warren Buffett
50. “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.”
— Warren Buffett
51. “Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.”
— Warren Buffett
52. “Focus alone is not enough; putting in the time to commit is also crucial to achieve success.”
— Warren Buffett
53. “Tell me who your heroes are and I’ll tell you how you’ll turn out to be.”
— Warren Buffett
54. “Everybody’s got a different circle of competence. The important thing is not how big the circle is. The important thing is staying inside the circle.”
— Warren Buffett
55. “I will tell you the secret to getting rich on Wall Street. You try to be greedy when others are fearful. And you try to be fearful when others are greedy.”
— Warren Buffett
56. “The most dangerous distractions are the ones you love, but that don’t love you back.”
— Warren Buffett
57. “I never try to predict the market.”
— Warren Buffett
58. “I try to buy stock in businesses that are so wonderful that an idiot can run them. Because sooner or later, one will.”
— Warren Buffett
59. “I made my first investment at age eleven. I was wasting my life up until then.”
— Warren Buffett
60. “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.”
— Warren Buffett
61. “The Stock Market is designed to transfer money from the Active to the Patient.”
— Warren Buffett
62. “Do not put all your eggs in one basket.”
— Warren Buffett
63. “Our goal is to find an outstanding business at a sensible price, not a mediocre business at a bargain price.”
— Warren Buffett
64. “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?”
— Warren Buffett
65. “A bull market is like sex. It feels best just before it ends.”
— Warren Buffett
66. “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.”
— Warren Buffett
67. “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
68. “If you’re in the luckiest 1 percent of humanity, you owe it to the rest of humanity to think about the other 99 percent.”
— Warren Buffett
69. “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.”
— Warren Buffett
70. “Equities will do well over time – you just have to avoid getting excited when other people are getting excited.”
— Warren Buffett
71. “Investment philosophy is the clear understanding that by owning shares of stocks he owns businesses, not pieces of paper.”
— Warren Buffett
72. “Mr. Market is kind of a drunken psycho. Some days he gets very enthused, some days he gets very depressed. And when he get really enthused you sell to him, and if he gets depressed, you buy from him. There’s no moral taint attached to that.”
— Warren Buffett
73. “I’d rather have a $10 million business making 15 per cent than a $100 million business making 5 per cent.”
— Warren Buffett
74. “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
75. “With each investment you make, you should have the courage and the conviction to place at least ten per cent of your net worth in that stock.”
— Warren Buffett
76. “With a wonderful business, you can figure out what will happen; you can’t figure out when it will happen. You don’t want to focus on when, you want to focus on what. If you’re right about what, you don’t have to worry about when.”
— Warren Buffett
77. “In looking for people to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. And if they don’t have the first, the other two will kill you.”
— Warren Buffett
78. “A single year’s performance is of minor importance and, good or bad, should never be taken seriously.”
— Warren Buffett
79. “You shouldn’t own common stocks if a 50 percent decrease in their value in a short period of time would cause you acute distress.”
— Warren Buffett
80. “There are all kinds of businesses that Charlie and I don’t understand, but that doesn’t cause us to stay up at night. It just means we go on to the next one, and that’s what the individual investor should do.”
— Warren Buffett
81. “Nothing sedates rationality like large doses of effortless money.”
— Warren Buffett
82. “I find that the standard of living does not go up in proportion with the cost of living. The trick in life is to do things that are fun all the time.”
— Warren Buffett
83. “When you combine ignorance and leverage, you get some pretty interesting results.”
— Warren Buffett
84. “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
85. “Over the years, a number of very smart people have learned the hard way that a long string of impressive numbers multiplied by a single zero always equals zero.”
— Warren Buffett
86. “You are lucky in life if you have the right heroes. I advise all of you, to the extent you can, to pick out a few heroes.”
— Warren Buffett
87. “If at first you do succeed, quit trying on investing.”
— Warren Buffett
88. “One’s objective should be to get it right, get it quick, get it out and get it over. Your problem won’t improve with age.”
— Warren Buffett
89. “Take the probability of loss times the amount of possible loss from the probability of gain times the amount of possible gain. That is what we’re trying to do. It’s imperfect, but that’s what it’s all about.”
— Warren Buffett
90. “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.”
— Warren Buffett
91. “No formula in finance tells you that the moat is 28 feet wide and 16 feet deep. That’s what drives the academics crazy. They can compute standard deviations and betas, but they can’t understand moats.”
— Warren Buffett
92. “In the insurance business, there is no statute of limitation on stupidity.”
— Warren Buffett
93. “Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.”
— Warren Buffett
94. “In our view, derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction carrying dangers that, while latent, are potentially lethal.”
— Warren Buffett
95. “I would say that life at 84, I am having as much fun as I’ve ever had in my life. I mean I get to do what I love every day with the people I love-and it just doesn’t get any better than that.”
— Warren Buffett
96. “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”
— Warren Buffett
97. “Invest in as much of yourself as you can, you are your own biggest asset by far.”
— Warren Buffett
98. “We always live in an uncertain world. What is certain is that the United States will go forward over time.”
— Warren Buffett
99. “If knowing history made you rich, librarians would be billionaires.”
— Warren Buffett
100. “We do not view the company itself as the ultimate owner of our business assets but instead view the company as a conduit through which our shareholders own assets.”
— Warren Buffett
101. “In a difficult business, no sooner is one problem solved than another surfaces – never is there just one cockroach in the kitchen.”
— Warren Buffett
102. “Investing is simple, but not easy.”
— Warren Buffett
103. “Read 500 pages every day. That’s how knowledge works. It builds up like compound interest.”
— Warren Buffett
104. “I could end the deficit in five minutes. You just pass a law that says that any time there’s a deficit of more than three percent of GDP, all sitting members of Congress are ineligible for re-election.”
— Warren Buffett
105. “Either they’re trying to con you or they’re trying to con themselves.”
— Warren Buffett
106. “The key to success is emotional stability.”
— Warren Buffett
107. “Take the high road; it’s far less crowded.”
— Warren Buffett
108. “Trust is like the air we breathe – when it’s present, nobody really notices; when it’s absent, everybody notices.”
— Warren Buffett
109. “If you want to soar like an eagle in life, you can’t be flocking with the turkeys.”
— Warren Buffett
110. “Successful Investing takes time, discipline and patience. No matter how great the talent or effort, some things just take time: You can’t produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant.”
— Warren Buffett
111. “The secret to happiness is having low expectations.”
— Warren Buffett
112. “Money is not everything. Make sure you earn a lot before speaking such nonsense.”
— Warren Buffett
113. “You can’t make a good deal with a bad person.”
— Warren Buffett
114. “The rich invest in time, the poor invest in money.”
— Warren Buffett
115. “Never depend on a single source of income.”
— Warren Buffett
116. “Intensity is the price of excellence.”
— Warren Buffett
117. “Larger sums may be an advantage at some cases and a disadvantage at others.”
— Warren Buffett
118. “Diversification may preserve wealth, but concentration builds wealth.”
— Warren Buffett
119. “Never test the depth of river with both the feet.”
— Warren Buffett
120. “The Noah rule: Predicting rain doesn’t count; building arks does.”
— Warren Buffett
121. “Very successful people say no to almost everything.”
— Warren Buffett
122. “Cash combined with courage in a time of crisis is priceless.”
— Warren Buffett
123. “Failure comes from ego, greed, envy, fear, imitation. I have success not because I am smart, but because I am rational.”
— Warren Buffett
124. “The greatest Enemies of the Equity investor are Expenses and Emotions.”
— Warren Buffett
125. “Earnings can be pliable as putty when a charlatan heads the company reporting them.”
— Warren Buffett
126. “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.”
— Warren Buffett
127. “If you lose money for the firm, I will be forgiving. If you lose reputation, I will be ruthless.”
— Warren Buffett
128. “We enjoy the process far more than the proceeds.”
— Warren Buffett
129. “Investing requires qualities of temperament way more than it requires qualities of intellect.”
— Warren Buffett
130. “Never risk what you have and need for what we don’t have and don’t need.”
— Warren Buffett
131. “Whatever you like to do, make it a hobby and whatever the world likes to do, make it a business.”
— Warren Buffett
132. “It’s much easier to stay out of trouble now than to get out of trouble later.”
— Warren Buffett
133. “It’s far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price.”
— Warren Buffett
134. “Never invest in a business you can’t understand.”
— Warren Buffett
135. “When people tell me they’ve learned from experience, I tell them the trick is to learn from other people’s experience.”
— Warren Buffett
136. “If you can’t communicate and talk to other people and get across your ideas, you’re giving up your potential.”
— Warren Buffett
137. “It is not necessary to do extraordinary things to get extraordinary results.”
— Warren Buffett
138. “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.”
— Warren Buffett
139. “There’s no use running if you’re on the wrong road.”
— Warren Buffett
140. “The wise man once said invest young.”
— Warren Buffett
141. “My favorite holding period is forever.”
— Warren Buffett
142. “Diversification is protection against ignorance. It makes little sense if you know what you are doing.”
— Warren Buffett
143. “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.”
— Warren Buffett
144. “Nevertheless, as circumstances presently appear, I feel substantially greater size is more likely to harm future results than to help them. This might not be true for my own personal results, but it is likely to be true for your results.”
— Warren Buffett
145. “Time is your friend, impulse is your enemy. Take advantage of compound interest and don’t be captivated by the siren song of the market.”
— Warren Buffett
146. “If you can’t read the scoreboard. You don’t know the score. If you don’t know the score, you can’t tell the winners from the losers.”
— Warren Buffett
147. “Asking for financial advice from a financial planner is like asking a barber if you need a hair cut.”
— Warren Buffett
148. “You don’t need to have extraordinary effort to achieve extraordinary results. You just need to do the ordinary, everyday things exceptionally well.”
— Warren Buffett
149. “Investment must be rational; if you can’t understand it, don’t do it.”
— Warren Buffett
150. “Investing is laying out money now to get more money back in the future.”
— Warren Buffett
151. “Taking jobs to build up your resume is the same as saving up sex for old age.”
— Warren Buffett
152. “Mr. Market is your servant, not your guide.”
— Warren Buffett
153. “I don’t look to jump over 7-foot bars: I look around for 1-foot bars that I can step over.”
— Warren Buffett
154. “Never give up searching for the job that you’re passionate about.”
— Warren Buffett
155. “We don’t read other people’s opinions. We want to get the facts, and then think.”
— Warren Buffett
156. “What the human being is best at doing is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact.”
— Warren Buffett
157. “By periodically investing in an index fund, the know-nothing investors can actually outperform most investment professionals.”
— Warren Buffett
158. “Valuing a business is part art and part science.”
— Warren Buffett
159. “Like most trends, at the beginning it’s driven by fundamentals, at some point speculation takes over. What the wise man does in the beginning, the fool does in the end.”
— Warren Buffett
160. “Whether we’re talking about socks or stocks, I like buying quality merchandise when it is marked down.”
— Warren Buffett
161. “The trick is, when there is nothing to do, do nothing.”
— Warren Buffett
162. “When investing, pessimism is your friend, euphoria the enemy.”
— Warren Buffett
163. “Energy deregulation will be the largest transfer of wealth in history.”
— Warren Buffett
164. “First come the innovators, then come the imitators, then come the idiots.”
— Warren Buffett
165. “A prediction about the direction of the stock market tells you nothing about where stocks are headed, but a whole lot about the person doing the predicting.”
— Warren Buffett
166. “No matter how great the talent or efforts, some things just take time.”
— Warren Buffett
167. “Derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction.”
— Warren Buffett
168. “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.”
— Warren Buffett
169. “Exercise humility and restraint.”
— Warren Buffett
170. “Enjoy your work and work for whom you admire.”
— Warren Buffett
171. “It is more important to say “no” to an opportunity, than to say “yes”.”
— Warren Buffett
172. “Interest rates are to asset prices what gravity is to the apple. When there are low interest rates, there is a very low gravitational pull on asset prices.”
— Warren Buffett
173. “A great investment opportunity occurs when a marvelous business encounters a one-time huge, but solvable problem.”
— Warren Buffett
174. “Focus on return on equity, not earnings per share.”
— Warren Buffett
175. “Other guys read Playboy. I read annual reports.”
— Warren Buffett
176. “Only when you combine sound intellect with emotional discipline do you get rational behavior.”
— Warren Buffett
177. “The most important quality for an investor is temperament, not intellect. You need a temperament that neither derives great pleasure from being with the crowd or against the crowd.”
— Warren Buffett
178. “My wealth has come from a combination of living in America, some lucky genes, and compound interest.”
— Warren Buffett
179. “Only buy something that you’d be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years.”
— Warren Buffett
180. “Growth and value investing are joined at the hip.”
— Warren Buffett
181. “It is impossible to unsign a contract, so do all your thinking before you sign.”
— Warren Buffett
182. “I’ve seen more people fail because of liquor and leverage – leverage being borrowed money. 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.”
— Warren Buffett
183. “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.”
— Warren Buffett
184. “I have three boxes on my desk: In, Out, and Too Hard.”
— Warren Buffett
185. “I read annual reports of the company I’m looking at and I read the annual reports of the competitors – that is the main source of material.”
— Warren Buffett
186. “What’s nice about investing is you don’t have to swing at every pitch.”
— Warren Buffett
187. “Do what you would do for free, having passion for what you do is the most important thing.”
— Warren Buffett
188. “People will always try to stop you from doing the right thing if it is unconventional.”
— Warren Buffett
189. “Cash, though, 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. When bills come due, only cash is legal tender. Don’t leave home without it.”
— Warren Buffett
190. “Making money isn’t the backbone of our guiding purpose; making money is the by-product of our guiding purpose. If you’re doing something you love, you’re more likely to put your all into it, and that generally equates to making money.”
— Warren Buffett
191. “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
192. “Activity is the enemy of investment returns.”
— Warren Buffett
193. “Look for companies with high profit margins.”
— Warren Buffett
194. “To win, the first thing you have to do is not lose.”
— Warren Buffett
195. “Cultivate curiosity and strive to become a little wiser every day.”
— Warren Buffett
196. “Do what you love and work for whom you admire the most, and you’ve given yourself the best chance in life you can.”
— Warren Buffett
197. “When it’s raining gold, reach for a bucket, not a thimble.”
— Warren Buffett
198. “The best education you can get is investing in yourself, and that doesn’t mean college or university.”
— Warren Buffett
199. “Buy companies with strong histories of profitability and with a dominant business franchise.”
— Warren Buffett
200. “The plan itself is opportunism. There is no plan before that.”
— Warren Buffett
