Quotes

All successful investment involves trying to get into something where it’s worth more than you’re paying.

Over the long-term, big companies of America behave more like biology than they do anything else. In biology, all the individuals die and so do all the species. It’s just a question of time. And that’s pretty well what happens in the economy too.

A lot of smart people think they’re way smarter than they are, and therefore they do worse than dumb people. And it’s very common to be utterly brilliant and think you’re way the hell smarter than you are.

I’m a big fan of knowing the big ideas in pretty much all the disciplines -- the ones that are pretty easy to assimilate -- and then using those routinely in your judgments. That’s just my system.

If you want to succeed in investments, start early and try hard and keep doing it. All success comes that way, by and large.

When investors -- individual and institutional alike -- engage in far more trading --inevitably with one another -- than is necessary for market efficiency and ample liquidity, they become, collectively, their own worst enemies.

There is one law I believe in, which I call elasticity. That is simply an intuitive non-scientific term for the law of regression to the mean. What goes up does not have to come down, but what goes up a lot more than everything else, frequently has to lay fallow for a long time while much else catches up.

Cash really hurts if you hold it very long in an equity market that is compounding at close to 20% per annum.

For social and sentimental reasons, people have a propensity to want to do really dumb things from time to time.

I think you have to be an undying optimist, and perhaps a Pollyanna to enjoy and to be successful at managing common stock portfolios over a long period of time.

One thing all of us know for sure is that the stock market doesn't go down just because a lot of folks think that it has entered the heart of looney land.

To beat the market is not easy. In addition to a good investment manager, the investor needs perspective, patience, and courage -- qualities that do not abound in today’s intensely competitive world.