Warren Buffett

Our favorite holding period is forever.

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.

Successful investing takes time, discipline and patience. No matter how great the talent or efforts, some things just take time. You can’t produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant.

Only when you combine sound intellect with emotional discipline do you get rational behavior.

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

If you are in a poker game and after 20 minutes you don’t know who the patsy is, then you’re the patsy.

With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man’s past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame.

The world will only, in the end, follow those who have despised as well as served it.

A banker is a fellow who lends his umbrella when the sun is shining and wants it back the minute it begins to rain.

In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.

The ocean is a wilderness reaching round the globe, wilder than a Bengal jungle, and fuller of monsters, washing the very wharves of our cities and the gardens of our sea-side residences.

I know that we will be the sufferers if we let great wrongs occur without exerting ourselves to correct them.

Slanderers do not hurt me because they do not hit me.

Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote these books. Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we have the book-worm.

Find people who will make you better.

If you want the moon, do not hide from the night. If you want a rose, do not hide from the thorns. If you want love, do not hide from yourself.

A man of genius is privileged only as far as he is genius. His dullness is as insupportable as any other dullness.

Any enlightenment which requires to be authenticated, certified, recognized, congratulated, is false, or at least incomplete.

Good poetry seems too simple and natural a thing that when we meet it we wonder that all men are not always poets. Poetry is nothing but healthy speech.

There is one topic peremptorily forbidden to all well-bred, to all rational mortals, namely, their distempers. If you have not slept, or if you have slept, or if you have headache, or sciatica, or leprosy, or thunder-stroke, I beseech you, by all angels, to hold your peace, and not pollute the morning.

It is a fine thing to be honest, but it is also very important to be right.