From Peter Bevelin’s “From Darwin to Munger”
My Favorite Warren Buffet Quotes:
“I have learned mainly by reading myself. So I don’t think I have any original ideas. Certainly, I talk about reading Graham. I’ve read Phil Fisher. So I’ve gotten a lot of my ideas from reading. You can learn a lot from other people. In fact, I think if you learn basically from other people, you don’t have to get too many new ideas on your own. You can just apply the best of what you see.”
“What’s really astounding, is how resistant some people are to learning anything … even when it’s in their self-interest to learn. There is just an incredible resistance to thinking or changing. Bertrand Russell once said: ‘Most men would rather die than think. Many have.’ And in a financial sense, that’s very true.”
“I don’t have to be smart about everything; I didn’t deliver my wife’s baby! So I believe in using people who are smarter than I am.”
“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.”
“As people get wealthy here, they start casting their eyes about, and they don’t get more satisfied. Sometimes they get more dissatisfied. That’s happened in the United States. Right now we have six time the GDP per capita, in real terms, as when I was born. Now, I don’t know wether people are happier now or more discontent or what than they were in 1930. But people have a way of adjusting very quickly to things becoming better, and then any little tiny adjustment downward they can get quite unhappy about.”
“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?”
“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.”
“My wealth has come from a combination of living in America, some lucky genes, and compound interest.”
“In the world of business, the people who are most successful are those who are doing what they love.”
“If you work with people who cause your stomach to churn, I’d say get another job. That is a terrible way to go through life, and you only go through life once.”
“I never saw my dad do anything in his entire life that he wouldn’t feel good about being on the front page of the paper… He gave me unconditional love… He was a terrific human being.”
“Marry the right person. And I’m serious about that. It will make more difference in your life. It will change your aspiration, all kind of things. It’s enormously important who you marry.”
“The big question about how people behave is whether they’ve got an Inner Scorecard or Outer Scorecard. It helps if you can be satisfied with an Inner Scorecard. I always pose it this way. I say: “Look, Would you rather be the word’s greatest lover, but have everyone think you’re the world’s worst lover? Or would your rather be the world’s worst lover but have everyone think you’re the world’s greatest lover?”
“Your best investment is yourself. There is nothing that compares to it.”
“You gotta do what you love. You’ve got to have a passion for it. If you’re not doing it, get into something else. There is something out there for you… As long as you are doing something that your enjoy, it doesn’t really make a difference whether you’ve got $10 million or $100 million or $1 million. You want to have enough so you can do most of the things in life you like doing. That doesn’t take a fortune.”
“Do what you would do if you were in my position, where the money means nothing to you. At 79…I work every day. And it’s what I want to do more than anything else in the world. The closer you can come to that early on in your life, you know the more fun you’re going to have in life and really the better you’re going to do.”
“The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything.“
“Basically, when you get to my age, you’ll really measure your success in life by how many of the people you want to have love you actually do love you. I know people who have a lot of money, and they get testimonial dinners and they get hospital wings named after them. But the truth is that nobody in the world loves them. 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.”
“That’s the ultimate test of how you have lived your life. The trouble with love is that you can’t buy it … The only way to get love is to be lovable … The more you give love away, the more you get.”
“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.”
“I have every possession I want. I have a lot of friends who have a lot more possessions. But in some cases, I feel the possession possess them, rather than the other way around.”
“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.”
“”It’s ego. It’s greed. It’s envy. It’s fear. I mean there are a variety of factors that cause that horsepower of the mind to get diminished dramatically before the output turns out.”
“I do think it’s a mistake to get angry with people that disagree with you…it does not help when you demonize or get too violent with the people you’re talking to.” – Buffet (p. 64)
“It’s not greed that drives the world, but envy” – Buffet (p. 65)
“Our experience is that envy is what really drives people. You can give someone $2 million bonus and they’re happy until they see the next guy got $2.1 million and then they’re miserable.” – Buffet (p. 65)
“I learned that it pays to hang around with people better than you are, because you will float upward a little bit. And if you hang around with people that behave worse than you, pretty soon you’ll start sliding down the pole. It just works that way.” – Buffet (p. 70)
“I am so blessed. I get to do what I like to do with people that I love. That is happiness. I am happy day after day after day. How could I be any happier?” “When you get to be my age you will be successful if the people who you hope to have love you, do love you. Charlie and I know people who have buildings named after them, receive great honors, etc. and nobody love them- not even the people who give them honors.” Buffet (p. 71)
“When a problem exists, whether in personnel or in business operations, the time to act is now.” – Buffet (p. 92)
“Mike Tyson doesn’t try to run Berkshire, and I don’t try to get in the ring with Mike Tyson…When my wife and I had a baby, we hired an obstetrician-I didn’t try to do it myself. When my tooth hurts, I don’t turn to Charlie…The idea that you let other people do what they’re best at and you do what you’re best at, I’ve carried from lawn moving to philanthropy.” – Buffett (p. 181)
“Stick with what they understand and let their abilities, not their egos, determine what they attempt. (Thomas J. Watson Sr. of IBM followed the same rule: ‘I’m no genius,’ he said, I’m smart in spots- but I stay around those spots.’) – Buffett (p 182)
“I don’t want to play in a game where the other guy has an advantage. Somebody asked, ‘How do you beat Bobby Fisher?’ The answer was ‘you play him any game except chess’…That ability to know when your odds are good versus playing outside that game is a huge asset.’ – Buffett (p. 182)
“Stocks are riskless if held over a long time frame as you are simply giving up purchasing power now for later. Cash is the risky asset. Risk in stocks is not what the companies will do. Traditional finance teaches that Beta is a measure of risk but volatility isn’t risk. Risk is loss of purchasing power. Volatility declines over a long enough timeframe. It is individuals that make investments risky…People think stocks are riskier than bonds, which is not true for a long term horizon.” – Buffett (p. 197)
“Actually, I probably spend five or six hours a day on reading.”- Buffett (p. 224)
“Our goal is more modest: we simply attempt to be fearful when others are greedy and to be greedy only when others are fearful.” Buffett (p. 142)
“Charlie and I decided long ago that in an investment lifetime, it’s just too hard to make hundreds of smart decisions…Therefore, we adopted a strategy that required our being smart- and not too smart at that- only a very few times.” -Buffett (p. 143)
“An investor needs to do very few things right as long as he or she avoids big mistakes.” – Buffett (p. 143)
“Periodically, financial markets will become divorced from reality- you can count on that” – Buffett (p. 143)
“Risk comes from not knowing what you are doing.” – Buffett (p. 148)
“There seems to be some perverse human characteristic that likes to make easy things difficult.” “Ben Graham taught me 45 years ago that in investing it is not necessary to do extraordinary things to get extraordinary results. In later life, I have been surprised to find that this statement holds true in business management as well. What a manager must do is handle the basics well and not get diverted.” -Buffett (p. 155)
“In a bull market, one must avoid the error of the preening duck that quacks boastfully after a torrential rainstorm, thinking that its paddling skills have caused it to rise in the world.” – Buffett (p. 170)
“If merely looking up past financial data would tell you what the future holds, the Forbes 400 would consists of librarians.” -Buffett (p. 171)
“Don’t ask the barber whether you need a haircut.” – Buffett (p. 172)
“It just doesn’t work if you don’t admire or trust them. I do not hire people I would not want as friends or neighbors. I work with people who make my life easier. You can’t work with people who make your stomach grind.” – Buffett (p. 74)
“Make yourself a person that you would want to hire. We look for people with not necessary the highest IQs, but people who have a good work ethic, are loyal, honest and reliable.”- Buffet (p. 74)
“It’s hard to change others’ behavior, and it’s not helped by shouting.” – Buffet (p. 112)
“If you understand an idea, you can express it so others can understand it. I find that every year when I write the report. I this these blocks. The block isn’t because I’ve run out of words in the dictionary. The block is because I haven’t got it straight in my mind yet. There’s nothing like writing to force you to think and to get your thoughts straight.” – Buffet (p. 117)
“Charlie and I have run into more dysfunctional people with 160 IQs than most people, probably…We’ve seen people self-destruct in pursuit of making money they didn’t really need because they were already rich.” – Buffett (p. 128)
“I think the people who say, ‘I need more’ and therefore try to get more than they need, are likely to get into terrible trouble.” – Buffett (p. 129)
“Remember the late Barton Biggs’ observation: ‘ A bull market is like sex. It feels best just before it ends.” – Buffett (p. 141)
“It’s just the scope of human beings to do crazy things, self-destructive things…most people, even smart people, have trouble not getting caught up in the game and thinking I’ll just dance one more dance like Cinderella at five minutes till twelve or something like that because they think they are smarter than the rest of the public…Or they don’t protect themselves against something that will come totally from right field.” – Buffett (p. 141)
“The trick is to learn most lessons from the experiences of others” – Buffet (p.19)
“Every time you hear the phrase ‘Everybody else is doing it’ it should raise a huge flag. Why would somebody offer such a rationale for an act if there were a good reason available?” -Buffet (p. 48)
“you can always tell someone to go to hell tomorrow…You haven’t missed the opportunity. Just forget about it for a day. If you feel the same way tomorrow, tell them then- but don’t spout off in a moment of anger.” – Buffet (p. 64)
“They are simply a matter of deciding what you are going to do and what kind of person you are going to make out of yourself, and then doing it…You choose what kind of human being you’re going to be, and then other people choose whether they’ll associated with you or not.” – Buffet (p. 72)