Warren Buffett Quotes

The value of market esoterica to the consumer of investment advice is a different story. In my opinion, investment success will not be produced by arcane formulae, computer programs or signals flashed by the price behavior of stocks and markets. Rather an investor will succeed by coupling good business judgment with an ability to insulate his thoughts and behavior from the super-contagious emotions that swirl about the marketplace.

The most important quality for an investor is temperament, not intellect.

In the world of money and investing, you must learn to control your emotions.

The three traits speculators must learn to manage within themselves are confidence, fear, and aggressiveness.

Success in investing doesn't correlate with I.Q. once you're above the level of 25. Once you have ordinary intelligence, what you need is the temperament to control the urges that get other people into trouble in investing.

Wall Street is littered with the bones of those who knew just what to do, but could not bring themselves to do it.

The greatest enemies of the equity investor are expenses and emotions.

One of the most helpful things that anybody can learn is to give up trying to catch the last eighth - or the first. These two are the most expensive eighths in the world. They have cost stock traders, in the aggregate, enough millions of dollars to build a concrete highway across the continent.

To invest successfully over a lifetime does not require a stratospheric IQ, unusual business insights, or inside information. What's needed is a sound intellectual framework for making decisions and the ability to keep emotions from corroding that framework. You must supply the emotional discipline.

Investors should remember that excitement and expenses are their enemies.

The investor who permits himself to be stampeded or unduly worried by unjustified market declines in his holdings is perversely transforming his basic advantage into a basic disadvantage.

Your success in investing will depend in part on your character and guts, and in part on your ability to realize at the height of ebullience and the depth of despair alike that this too shall pass.

It is obvious that the performance of a stock last year or last month is no reason, per se, to either own it or to not own it now. It is obvious that an inability to "get even" in a security that has declined is of no importance. It is obvious that the inner warm glow that results from having held a winner last year is of no importance in making a decision as to whether it belongs in an optimum portfolio this year.

The intelligent investor is a realist who sells to optimists and buys from pessimists.

Mastering our emotions has nothing to do with asceticism or repression, for the purpose is not to break the emotions or deny them but to "break in" the emotions, making them teachable because they are tamed.

I never, ever, ever let emotion get in the way of an investment.

Don't let your emotions overpower your intelligence.

Be fearful when there is greed and be greedy when there is fear.

Speculation leads you the wrong way. It allows you to put your emotions first, whereas investment gets emotions out of the picture.

The principles of successful stock speculation are based on the supposition that people will continue in the future to make the mistakes that they have made in the past.

Be fearful when the markets get greedy, be greedy when the markets get fearful.

A businessman is someone who buys at ten and is happy to get out at twelve. The other kind of man buys at ten, sees it rise to eighteen and does nothing. He is waiting for it to rise to twenty. When it drops to two he waits for it to get back to ten.

Balanced emotions are crucial to intuitive decision making.

It is only by understanding the emotion of others that an investor has a chance to produce superior results.

You cannot antagonize and be a positive influence, and you will antagonize when you discipline through emotion.