Warren Buffett is the best investor of our time. Better yet, he has shown a remarkable willingness to share his knowledge through interviews, letters, and most notably the Berkshire Hathaway annual reports. This presentation presents some of Buffett's most memorable quotes that have a real capability of impacting your personal investing strategy.

1. 107 Warren Buffett
Quotes That Will
Change How You
Invest
Sure Dividend
from Sure Dividend

2. Sure Dividend
Table of Contents
1. On Evaluating Businesses
2. On Long-Term Investing
3. On Do-Nothing Investing
4. On The Circle of Competence
5. On Competitive Advantages
6. On Value & When to Buy
7. On When To Sell
8. On Risk
9. On Personal Finance
10. On Learning & Self-Improvement
11. On Charity & Legacies
12. On History and Forecasting
13. On Crowd Thinking
14. On Investing Best Practices
15. On Corporate Management

3. Sure Dividend
On Evaluating Businesses
“We select such investments on a long-term basis, weighing the
same factors as would be involved in the purchase of 100% of an
operating business:
(1) favorable long-term economic characteristics;
(2) competent and honest management;
(3) purchase price attractive when measured against the
yardstick of value to a private owner; and
(4) an industry with which we are familiar and whose long-term
business characteristics we feel competent to judge.”

4. Sure Dividend
On Long-Term Investing
Warren Buffett is an extraordinarily long-term investor.
His investing style is characterized by holding periods that
span decades. The following quotes illustrate this nicely:
“I never attempt to make money on the stock market. I
buy on the assumption that they could close the market
the next day and not reopen it for five years.”
“Only buy something that you’d be perfectly happy to
hold if the market shut down for 10 years.”
“If you aren’t willing to own a stock for ten years, don’t
even think about owning it for ten minutes”

5. Sure Dividend
On Long-Term Investing
“When we own portions of outstanding
businesses with outstanding
managements, our favorite holding
period is forever.”
“Time is the friend of the wonderful
company, the enemy of the mediocre.”

6. Sure Dividend
On Long-Term Investing
“Over the long term, the stock market news
will be good. In the 20th century, the United
States endured two world wars and other
traumatic and expensive military conflicts;
the Depression; a dozen or so recessions and
financial panics; oil shocks; a fly epidemic;
and the resignation of a disgraced president.
Yet the Dow rose from 66 to 11,497.”

7. Sure Dividend
On Long-Term Investing
One of the benefits of long holding periods is the deferral of
capital gains tax, which is only triggered when an investor sells.
Because of Buffett’s notably long holding periods, the deferral of
capital gains tax has been called a “Buffett Loan”.
With that said, Warren Buffett maintains that he would still have
long holding periods even without these tax advantages:
“Charlie and I would follow a buy-and-hold policy even if we ran
a tax-exempt institution.”

8. Sure Dividend
On Long-Term Investing
Warren Buffett is also known for
being very patient:
“Someone’s sitting in the shade today
because someone planted a tree a
long time ago.”
“Calling someone who trades actively
in the market an investor is like calling
someone who repeatedly engages in
one-night stands a romantic.”

9. Sure Dividend
On Long-Term Investing
“Successful Investing takes time, discipline and
patience. No matter how great the talent or effort,
some things just take time: You can’t produce a baby in
one month by getting nine women pregnant.”
“Buy a stock the way you would buy a house.
Understand and like it such that you’d be content to
own it in the absence of any market.”

10. Sure Dividend
On Do-Nothing Investing
Warren Buffett & his business colleagues have
been known to make so much money with do-
nothing investing that they describe it with the
word ‘assiduity’:
“Assiduity is the ability to sit on your ass and do
nothing until a great opportunities presents itself.”
– Charlie Munger (Warren Buffett’s business
partner and Vice Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway)

11. Sure Dividend
On Do-Nothing Investing
“I call investing the greatest business
in the world … because you never
have to swing. You stand at the plate,
the pitcher throws you General
Motors at 47! U.S. Steel at 39! and
nobody calls a strike on you. There’s
no penalty except opportunity lost.
All day you wait for the pitch you like;
then when the fielders are asleep,
you step up and hit it.”

12. Sure Dividend
On Do-Nothing Investing
“You do things when the
opportunities come along. I’ve had
periods in my life when I’ve had a
bundle of ideas come along, and I’ve
had long dry spells. If I get an idea
next week, I’ll do something. If not, I
won’t do a damn thing.”

13. Sure Dividend
On Do-Nothing Investing
“Opportunities
come infrequently.
When it rains gold,
put out the bucket,
not the thimble.”

14. Sure Dividend
On Do-Nothing Investing
“You only have to do a very few things right in your life
so long as you don’t do too many things wrong.”
“It is not necessary to do extraordinary things to get
extraordinary results.”
“An investor should act as though he had a lifetime
decision card with just twenty punches on it.”

15. Sure Dividend
On Do-Nothing Investing
“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.”

16. Sure Dividend
On the Circle of Competence
Warren Buffett has often preached that investors should identify
their ‘circle of competence’ – an area that they are
knowledgeable about – and stick to that area. This is a highly
applicable concept for investors, as the following quote
demonstrates:
“What an investor needs is the ability to correctly evaluate
selected businesses. Note that word ‘selected’: You don’t have
to be an expert on every company, or even many. 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.”

17. Sure Dividend
On the Circle of Competence
What’s more important than knowing what’s in your circle of
competence is knowing what’s not in your circle of competence:
“What counts for most people in investing is not how much they
know, but rather how realistically they define what they don’t
know.”
Similarly,
“There is nothing wrong with a ‘know nothing’ investor who
realizes it. The problem is when you are a ‘know nothing’
investor but you think you know something.”

18. Sure Dividend
On the Circle of Competence
“We make no attempt to pick the few
winners that will emerge from an ocean of
unproven enterprises. We’re not smart
enough to do that, and we know it. Instead,
we try to apply Aesop’s 2,600-year-old
equation to opportunities in which we have
reasonable confidence as to how many birds
are in the bush and when they will emerge.”

19. Sure Dividend
On Competitive Advantages
Warren Buffett has often touted the benefits of investing in the best
businesses - as measured by the strength of their competitive
advantages. The following quotes illustrate this nicely:
“The key to investing is not assessing how much an industry is going to
affect society, or how much it will grow, but rather determining the
competitive advantage of any given company and, above all, the
durability of that advantage.”
“The best thing is to learn from other guy’s mistakes. [General George S.]
Patton used to say, “It’s an honor to die for your country; make sure the
other guy gets the honor.” There are a lot of mistakes that I’ve repeated.
The biggest one, the biggest category over time, is being reluctant to pay
up a little for a business that I knew was really outstanding.”

20. Sure Dividend
On Competitive Advantages
Conversely, Buffett has recommended avoiding companies that lack
competitive advantages. He has often called these companies
‘commodity businesses’ because their only ability to compete is on price.
Here’s Buffett’s thoughts on commodity businesses:
“Stocks of companies selling commodity-like products should come with a
warning label: ‘Competition may prove hazardous to human wealth.’”
Commodity businesses that have found a way to survive are not great
businesses. The analogy below emphasizes this point:
“A horse that can count to ten is a remarkable horse—not a remarkable
mathematician.”

21. Sure Dividend
On Competitive Advantages
“Our approach is very
much profiting from
lack of change rather
than from change. With
Wrigley chewing gum,
it’s the lack of change
that appeals to me.”

22. Sure Dividend
On Value & When To Buy
Influenced by Benjamin Graham,
Warren Buffett has long practiced
value investing.
“Long ago, Ben Graham taught me that
‘Price is what you pay; value is what
you get.’ Whether we’re talking about
socks or stocks, I like buying quality
merchandise when it is marked down.”

23. Sure Dividend
On Value & When To Buy
As his career developed, Warren Buffett changed his focus from value
investing to franchise investing – buying the best businesses when their
price was fair.
“It’s far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair
company at a wonderful price.”
His focus on value remained a key component of his investing strategy.
“For the investor, a too-high purchase price for the stock of an excellent
company can undo the effects of a subsequent decade of favorable
business developments.”

24. Sure Dividend
On Value & When To Buy
With that said, he remained a contrarian:
“Most people get interested in stocks when everyone
else is. The time to get interested is when no one else is.
You can’t buy what is popular and do well.”
“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.”

25. Sure Dividend
On Value & When To Buy
“Be fearful when others are greedy and greedy only when others are
fearful.”
He also maintains that investors should welcome recessions – since they
present the opportunity to buy more shares of high-quality businesses on
the cheap.
“So smile when you read a headline that says ‘Investors lose as market
falls.’ Edit it in your mind to ‘Disinvestors lose as market falls—but
investors gain.’ Though writers often forget this truism, there is a buyer
for every seller and what hurts one necessarily helps the other.”

26. Sure Dividend
On Value & When To Buy
“The most common cause of low prices is
pessimism—some times pervasive, some
times specific to a company or industry. We
want to do business in such an environment,
not because we like pessimism but because
we like the prices it produces. It’s optimism
that is the enemy of the rational buyer.”

27. Sure Dividend
On When To Sell
“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.”
“The most important thing to do if
you find yourself in a hole is to
stop digging.”

28. Sure Dividend
On Risk
Warren Buffett is notoriously risk-averse. With that said, he does not
measure risk by volatility (as many academic researchers do). Here’s
Warren Buffett’s definition of risk:
“Risk comes from not knowing what you’re doing.”
Risk causes investors to lose money, which breaks Buffett’s rule #1:
“Rule No. 1: never lose money; rule No. 2: don’t forget rule No. 1.”
“When forced to choose, I will not trade even a night’s sleep for the
chance of extra profits.”

29. Sure Dividend
On Risk
Warren Buffett’s unconventional views
on risk lead him to manage a highly
concentrated investment portfolio. At the
time of this writing,
Warren Buffett’s stock portfolio has
~64% of its capital invested into his five
largest positions.
“Keep all your eggs in one basket, but
watch that basket closely.”
“Diversification is a protection against
ignorance. It makes very little sense for
those who know what they’re doing.”

30. Sure Dividend
On Risk
“We believe that a policy of portfolio concentration may well
decrease risk if it raises, as it should, both the intensity with
which an investor thinks about a business and the comfort-level
he must feel with its economic characteristics before buying into
it. In stating this opinion, we define risk, using dictionary terms,
as “the possibility of loss or injury.”
“It’s only when the tide goes out that you learn who has been
swimming naked.”

31. Sure Dividend
On Risk
“When you combine ignorance and leverage, you get
some pretty interesting results.”
“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.”

32. Sure Dividend
On Personal Finance
“I always knew I was going to be
rich. I don’t think I ever doubted it
for a minute. ”
“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.”

33. Sure Dividend
On Personal Finance
“Never give up searching for the job that you
are passionate about”
“…not doing what we love in the name of
greed is very poor management of our lives.”

34. Sure Dividend
On Personal Finance
“I learned to go into business only with people
whom I like, trust, and admire.”
“In the world of business, the people who are most
successful are those who are doing what they
love.”

35. Sure Dividend
On Personal Finance
“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?”

36. Sure Dividend
On Personal Finance
“I’m not interested in cars and my
goal is not to make people envious.
Don’t confuse the cost of living with
the standard of living.”
“Do not save what is left after
spending; instead spend what is left
after saving.”
“If you buy things you do not need,
soon you will have to sell things you
need.”

37. Sure Dividend
On Learning &
Self-Improvement
“Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be
broken.”
“By the age of 10, I’d read every book in the Omaha public library about
investing, some twice. You need to fill your mind with various competing
thoughts and decide which make sense. Then you have to jump in the
water – take a small amount of money and do it yourself. Investing on
paper is like reading a romance novel vs. doing something else. You’ll
soon find out whether you like it. The earlier you start, the better.”

38. Sure Dividend
On Learning &
Self-Improvement
“The most important investment you can make is in yourself.”
“Imagine that you had a car and that was the only car you’d have
for your entire lifetime. Of course, you’d care for it well,
changing the oil more frequently than necessary, driving
carefully, etc. Now, consider that you only have one mind and
one body. Prepare them for life, care for them. You can enhance
your mind over time. A person’s main asset is themselves, so
preserve and enhance yourself.”

39. Sure Dividend
On Learning &
Self-Improvement
“Life is like a snowball. The important thing is
finding wet snow and a really long hill. ”
“You’ve gotta keep control of your time, and
you can’t unless you say no. You can’t let
people set your agenda in life.”

40. Sure Dividend
On Learning &
Self-Improvement
“The difference between successful people and
really successful people is that really successful
people say no to almost everything.”
“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.”

41. Sure Dividend
On Learning &
Self-Improvement
How do you know when someone is serious? According to
Warren Buffet, it’s when their bank account comes into play.
“Writing a check separates a commitment from a conversation.”
Who we associate with and who we look up to matters. It gives a
reflection of who we are and who we are going to be.”
“Tell me who your heroes are and I’ll tell you how you’ll turn out
to be.”

42. Sure Dividend
On Learning &
Self-Improvement
“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin
it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.”
That’s why it is so important to associate with honest people.
The importance of honesty can hardly be overstated.
“Honesty is a very expensive gift, don’t expect it from cheap
people.”

43. Sure Dividend
On Charity and Legacies
Despite being a capitalist at heart, Buffett is actually extremely generous. You can see
this in his observable behavior.
First, Buffett makes the point of saving jobs in his company as long as they are
economically viable. The quote below shows this interesting viewpoint:
“I won’t close down a business of subnormal profitability merely to add a fraction of a
point to our corporate returns. I also feel it inappropriate for even an exceptionally
profitable company to fund an operation once it appears to have unending losses in
prospect. Adam Smith would disagree with my first proposition and Karl Marx would
disagree with my second; the middle ground is the only position that leaves me
comfortable.”

44. Sure Dividend
On Charity and Legacies
“I don’t have a problem with guilt about money. The way I see it is that
my money represents an enormous number of claim checks on society.
It’s like I have these little pieces of paper that I can turn into
consumption. If I wanted to, I could hire 10,000 people to do nothing but
paint my picture every day for the rest of my life. And the GDP would go
up. But the utility of the product would be zilch, and I would be keeping
those 10,000 people from doing AIDS research, or teaching, or nursing. I
don’t do that though. I don’t use very many of those claim checks. There’s
nothing material I want very much. And I’m going to give virtually all of
those claim checks to charity when my wife and I die.”

45. Sure Dividend
On Charity and Legacies
“If your employees, including
your CEO, wish to give to their
alma maters or other
institutions to which they feel a
personal attachment, we
believe they should use their
own money, not yours.”

46. Sure Dividend
On Charity and Legacies
“I believe in giving my kids enough
so they can do anything, but not so
much that they can do nothing.”

47. Sure Dividend
On History and Forecasting
“We’ve long felt that the only value of stock forecasters
is to make fortune tellers look good. Even now, Charlie
and I continue to believe that short-term market
forecasts are poison and should be kept locked up in a
safe place, away from children and also from grown-ups
who behave in the market like children.”
“Forecasts may tell you a great deal about the
forecaster; they tell you nothing about the future.”

48. Sure Dividend
On History and Forecasting
“In the 54 years (Charlie Munger and I) have
worked together, we have never forgone an
attractive purchase because of the macro or
political environment, or the views of other
people. In fact, these subjects never come up
when we make decisions.”

49. Sure Dividend
On History and Forecasting
“In the business world, the rearview mirror is always clearer than
the windshield.”
“What we learn from history is that people don’t learn from
history.”
“If past history was all that is needed to play the game of money,
the richest people would be librarians.”

50. Sure Dividend
On History and Forecasting
“Investors should be skeptical of history-based
models. Constructed by a nerdy-sounding
priesthood using esoteric terms such as beta,
gamma, sigma and the like, these models tend to
look impressive. Too often, though, investors
forget to examine the assumptions behind the
models. Beware of geeks bearing formulas.”

51. Sure Dividend
On Crowd Thinking
“You need to divorce your mind from the
crowd. The herd mentality causes all these IQ’s
to become paralyzed. I don’t think investors are
now acting more intelligently, despite the
intelligence. Smart doesn’t always equal
rational. To be a successful investor you must
divorce yourself from the fears and greed of the
people around you, although it is almost
impossible.”
“Nothing sedates rationality like large doses of
effortless money.”

52. Sure Dividend
On Crowd Thinking
“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. A right-thinking duck would
instead compare its position after the downpour to that of the other
ducks on the pond.”
“Failing conventionally is the route to go; as a group, lemmings may have
a rotten image, but no individual lemming has ever received bad press.”

53. Sure Dividend
On Crowd Thinking
“What the wise do in the beginning, fools do in the end.”
“But a pin lies in wait for every bubble. And when the two eventually
meet, a new wave of investors learns some very old lessons: First, many
in Wall Street — a community in which quality control is not prized — will
sell investors anything they will buy. Second, speculation is most
dangerous when it looks easiest.”

54. Sure Dividend
On Crowd Thinking
“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.”
“You’re dealing with a lot of silly people in the marketplace; it’s
like a great big casino and everyone else is boozing. If you can
stick with Pepsi, you should be O.K.”

55. Sure Dividend
On Crowd Thinking
“In some corner of the world they are probably still
holding regular meetings of the Flat Earth Society. We
derive no comfort because important people, vocal
people, or great numbers of people agree with us. Nor
do we derive comfort if they don’t.”

56. Sure Dividend
On Investing Best Practices
Buffett believes it takes intensity and passion to succeed in the stock market:
“Intensity is the price of excellence.”
With that said, he doesn’t tend to make things harder than they have to be.
“I don’t look to jump over 7-foot bars: I look around for 1-foot bars that I can step over.”
“There seems to be some perverse human characteristic that likes to make easy things
difficult”

57. Sure Dividend
On Investing Best Practices
If you don’t ‘get’ investing, don’t keep investing in individual businesses. It’s far better to
invest in high quality dividend ETFs than to play a game where you are the patsy.
“If you’ve been playing poker for half an hour and you still don’t know who the patsy is,
you’re the patsy.”
Keeping with the analogy of investing and games, one should look out for the next great
investment opportunity – not obsess over past performance.
“Games are won by players who focus on the playing field –- not by those whose eyes are
glued to the scoreboard.”

58. Sure Dividend
On Investing Best Practices
“You shouldn’t own common stocks if a 50% decrease in their value in a short period of
time would cause you acute distress.”
You cannot be successful in your investing career and be constantly swayed by changing
opinions of outsiders. It’s very important to believe in yourself and trust your judgement.
“I had a great teacher in life in my father. But I had another great teacher in terms of
profession in terms of Ben Graham. I was lucky enough to get the right foundation very
early on. And then basically I didn’t listen to anybody else. I just look in the mirror every
morning and the mirror always agrees with me. And I go out and do what I believe I
should be doing. And I’m not influenced by what other people think.”

59. Sure Dividend
On Corporate Management
“I try to buy stock in businesses that are so wonderful that an
idiot can run them because sooner or later, one will.”
“When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a
business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation
of the business that remains intact.”

60. Sure Dividend
On Corporate Management
“Loss of focus is what most worries Charlie and me
when we contemplate investing in businesses that in
general look outstanding. All too often, we’ve seen
value stagnate in the presence of hubris or of boredom
that caused the attention of managers to wander.

61. Sure Dividend
On Corporate Management
“Talking to Time Magazine a few years back, Peter Drucker got to
the heart of things: ‘I will tell you a secret: Dealmaking beats
working. Dealmaking is exciting and fun, and working is grubby.
Running anything is primarily an enormous amount of grubby
detail work . . . dealmaking is romantic, sexy. That’s why you
have deals that make no sense.’”

62. Sure Dividend
On Corporate Management
“In the long run
managements stressing
accounting appearance over
economic substance usually
achieve little of either.”

63. Sure Dividend
On Corporate Management
“Rationality frequently wilts when the institutional imperative comes into play. For
example:
(1) As if governed by Newton’s First Law of Motion, an institution will resist any change in
its current direction;
(2) Just as work expands to fill available time, corporate projects or acquisitions will
materialize to soak up available funds;
(3) Any business craving of the leader, however foolish, will be quickly supported by
detailed rate-of-return and strategic studies prepared by his troops; and
(4) The behavior of peer companies, whether they are expanding, acquiring, setting
executive compensation or whatever, will be mindlessly imitated.”

64. Sure Dividend
On Corporate Management
“Culture, more than rule books, determines how an organization behaves.”
“Having first-rate people on the team is more important than designing hierarchies and clarifying who
reports to whom.”
“Somebody once said that in looking for people to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence,
and energy. And if you don’t have the first, the other two will kill you. You think about it; it’s true. If you
hire somebody without [integrity], you really want them to be dumb and lazy.”
“If each of us hires people who are smaller than we are, we shall become a company of dwarfs. But, if each
of us hires people who are bigger than we are, we shall become a company of giants.”