Personal Improvement

Warren Buffett Quotes: 37 Lessons from the Oracle of Omaha

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The Oracle of Omaha is a font of wisdom. He is perhaps the most successful investor in Wall Street history.

His company, Berkshire Hathaway, currently sells for over $340,000 per share on the stock market. He’s perhaps the richest person in the United States with an estimated net worth over $87 billion.

So he knows a lot of lessons we can all benefit from. Warren Buffett quotes are almost as good as Yogi Berra quotes. Whether you want some inspirational words of wisdom on investing or how to be a better person, here are some of the best Warren Buffett quotes to live by.

Because every investor needs a little bit of Warren.

Warren Buffett Quotes on Risk

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

2. “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.”

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

4. “After all, you only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out.”

5. “Diversification is a protection against ignorance. It makes very little sense for those who know what they’re doing.”

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

So many people delay investing because they think they need to understand how it all works or to have lots of money before they can get started. You don’t. You can go to Betterment right now with zero knowledge of investing and almost zero dollars (there is no minimum) and get started.

Just do it. Do it now. Time is ticking, and the most powerful force in personal finance is compounding interest, but it needs time to work its alchemy.

This quote is accurate for lots of aspects of life. You don’t have to do an extraordinary amount of exercise to improve your health nor do you have to be an extraordinarily gifted athlete to get started. You don’t have to write a remarkable resume, the greatest resume ever crafted, to land an extraordinary job. But you do have to send out resumes.

You don’t have to be extraordinarily attractive or have an extraordinary game to ask that cute girl or boy out and find extraordinary love. To get extraordinary results, you just have to do a lot of normal things in the right direction.

And the right direction isn’t focused on the short-term gain but instead on long-term daily actions.

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

There is a vast difference between risk and calculated risk. But the only difference is research and preparation. It is risky to quit your job and start a new business. It is a calculated risk to do enough research to know that there is a demand for your business and to continue working your 9-5 until your business starts to make money.

It is a risk to invest in a company you know nothing about or a product you don’t understand. It is a calculated risk to research a company’s debt to equity ratio, price to earnings ratio, and who makes up the leadership and then decide whether or not to invest.

Warren Buffett Quotes on Habits

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

Most of us don’t realize the habits we’ve built until they’re a part of our unconscious routine (which makes them nefarious and difficult to break).

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Warren Buffett Quotes on Value

7. “Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.”

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

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

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

11. “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.”

“Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.”

One of my personal finance lessons is Vimes theory of boots. It explains how poor people spend more money on things over time than rich people because rich people can spend more up front for things of better quality that last longer. Poor people have to buy the cheapest option available, and those cheap options have to be replaced more often than better quality ones.

If you have to make a fairly expensive purchase, furniture, appliances, a computer, get the best available, which is not necessarily the most expensive, even if you have to save up for it. Buy it for Life is a great resource to get advice on making a purchase that will last.

When it comes to investing, price and value can be miles apart. Price can be tied to things like perception, fear, and greed. After shares of United plummeted in the wake of their scandalous treatment of a passenger on a deliberately overbooked plane, did that price drop reflect the value or was it a reaction to a viral incident?

An ideal time to buy United shares would have been after that story broke. The public was outraged but we are outraged by things on a daily basis, and one is quickly supplanted by the next. We have very short attention spans. If today you asked ten people which airline was involved in that incident, how many do you think would know?

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

Wait for a sale! If you have to make a big purchase, do some research and find out when that item goes on sale. For instance, exercise equipment goes on sale in January, hoping to cash in on those New Year’s Resolutions. Laptop and desktop computers go on sale in April.

Do your research like the Warren Buffett quote above told us, so you get a quality product and wait for the right time to buy so you get it at a reduced price.

Warren Buffett Quotes on People

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.”

13. “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.”

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

15. “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.”

16. “If you get to my age in life and nobody thinks well of you, I don’t care how big your bank account is, your life is a disaster.”

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

18. “Honesty is a very expensive gift, don’t expect it from cheap people.”

“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.”

You’re probably doing okay, but you could be doing better. One way to make yourself better is to spend time with people better than you. At whatever it is you want to be better at. If you want to get in shape, join a running or cycling club. If you want to eat better, only eat with people who already eat well. They don’t try to tempt you with cheeseburgers and dessert.

If you want to improve your career, find a mentor at work. You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. Look around at your five. Are they all who you would like to be? If not, find different people.

“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.”

To use the United example again, I’m sure there have been times the airline has flown a child who needed surgery in a hospital far from home for free. I’m sure they have upgraded returning soldiers to first class. I’m sure they have donated lots of money to charitable causes.

But I can’t recall a single story like any of those. What I and all of us can recall is the passenger getting beaten and dragged off a plane when he rightly refused to vacate a seat he paid for because the greedy airline deliberately oversold seats.

Everyone has a cell phone in their pocket, and if you are doing something stupid or scandalous or gross in public, someone will record it and put it on YouTube or Facebook. Heaven help you if you’re not anonymous and they have your name or someone who sees the video names you.

You may have been on your way to rescue some puppies from a fire and then to adopt some orphans, but if you call someone a racist name on the subway, that’s what everyone will know about you. Including potential employers, all of whom Google job candidates to see if they are a (not so) secret subway racist.

Warren Buffett Quotes on Business

19. “I don’t look to jump over 7-foot bars: I look around for 1-foot bars that I can step over.”

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

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

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

23. “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.”

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

“I don’t look to jump over 7-foot bars: I look around for 1-foot bars that I can step over.”

We can take this one a couple of ways. If something seems hard, find something that is easier. Or, if something seems hard, break it down into smaller pieces. Thomas uses the 1% method for this. Every day, he tries to do things just 1% better than he did yesterday.

Just under 15 minutes is equal to 1% of your day. If you didn’t exercise at all yesterday, you could make your 1% improvement just by working out for 15 minutes. Each day you can add another 1% to that 15 minutes until you are getting the proper amount of exercise each week.

Those small improvements, over time, can make a monumental difference to your habits and your life.

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

No one can be good at everything all the time. Everyone can make mistakes. But what you are good at and where you make your mistakes is what counts. If you invest early and often, you don’t have to have a big, impressive career making tons of money. You can be a content C student.

What you can’t do is have a C student career and no money invested, unless you never want to retire at least.

Warren Buffett Quotes on Investing

25. “Rule No.1: Never lose money. Rule No.2: Never forget rule No.1.”

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

27. “Our favorite holding period is forever.”

28. “Never invest in a business you cannot understand.”

29. “Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.”

30. “Wide diversification is only required when investors do not understand what they are doing.”

31. “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.”

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

33. “It’s not assessing how much an industry is going to affect society, or much it will grow, but rather determining the competitive advantage of any given company and, above all, the durability of that advantage.”

34. “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.”

35. “An investor should ordinarily hold a small piece of an outstanding business with the same tenacity that an owner would exhibit if he owned all of that business.”

36. “You only have to be able to evaluate companies within your circle of competence. The size of that circle is not very important; knowing its boundaries, however, is vital.”

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

When people get greedy, stock prices go up. When they get fearful, the prices go down. If you follow the herd and get greedy, you are likely to overpay for something that has an inflated value. If you go against the herd, you can get a great deal.

This was demonstrated when a Tesla caught fire in October 2013. People freaked, sure the cars were death traps. The stock dipped $12 per share, closing at $181 soon after the fire was made public. This was a great opportunity to buy the stock. Currently, it is worth $339.85 per share.

Before the 2008 housing crash, everyone and their grandmother were buying up houses they couldn’t afford. You might have thought you were really losing out. But then the crash happened, and people were punished harshly for their greed.

“Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.”

Long-term thinking (and investing) and planning allow us and others to reap the rewards in the future. If you saved up $500 and opened a Betterment account today and added another $500 a month ($6,000 a year) and earned an average of 7% for the next 20 years, you would have more than $265,000, over a quarter of a million dollars! 

If you got a late start and doubled those dollar amounts, $1,000 to start and $1,000 a month ($12,000 a year), but halved the amount of time to ten years, at the same 7%, you would have just over $179,000. There is no substitute for planting that tree early.

Warren on Predicting the Future

37. “We’ve long felt that the only value of stock forecasters is to make fortune-tellers look good.”

Be Like Warren

These Warren Buffett quotes are nearly all common sense. He doesn’t claim to be smarter than anyone else (although he is), he just sticks to common sense.

Successful investing is as simple as remaining true to a few core principles. We should all be like Warren.

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Candice Elliott - Senior Editor Candice Elliott is a substantial contributor to Listen Money Matters. She has been a personal finance writer since 2013 and has written extensively on student loan debt, investing, and credit. She has successfully navigated these areas in her own life and knows how to help others do the same. Candice has answered thousands of questions from the LMM community and spent countless hours doing research for hundreds of personal finance articles. She happily calls New Orleans, Louisiana home-the most fun city in the world.
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