The big money is not in the buying and the selling, but in the waiting.

You’re looking for a mispriced gamble. That’s what investing is. And you have to know enough to know whether the gamble is mispriced. That’s value investing.

If you took our top fifteen decisions out, we’d have a pretty average record. It wasn’t hyperactivity, but a hell of a lot of patience. You stuck to your principles and when opportunities came along, you pounced on them with vigor.

A great business at a fair price is superior to a fair business at a great price.

When any guy offers you a chance to earn lots of money without risk, don’t listen to the rest of his sentence. Follow this, and you’ll save yourself a lot of misery.

I think that, every time you see the word EBITDA, you should substitute the words “bullsh*t earnings.

Those who keep learning, will keep rising in life.

I constantly see people rise in life who are not the smartest, sometimes not even the most diligent, but they are learning machines. They go to bed every night a little wiser than they were when they got up and boy does that help, particularly when you have a long run ahead of you.

Knowing what you don't know is more useful than being brilliant.

Obviously if you want to get good at something which is competitive, you have to think about it and practice a lot. You have to keep learning because [the] world keeps changing and competitors keep learning.

If you think your IQ is 160 but it's 150, you're a disaster. It's much better to have a 130 IQ and think it's 120.

It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.

The first rule is that you’ve got to have multiple models — because if you just have one or two that you’re using, the nature of human psychology is such that you’ll torture reality so that it fits your models.

What is elementary, worldly wisdom? Well, the first rule is that you can’t really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang ’em back. If the facts don’t hang together on a latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form. You’ve got to have models in your head. And you’ve got to array your experience – both vicarious and direct – on this latticework of models. You may have noticed students who just try to remember and pound back what is remembered. Well, they fail in school and fail in life. You’ve got to hang experience on a latticework of models in your head.

Opportunity cost is a huge filter in life. If you’ve got two suitors who are really eager to have you and one is way the hell better than the other, you do not have to spend much time with the other. And that’s the way we filter out buying opportunities.

It’s like the old saying, ‘To the man with only a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.’ But that’s a perfectly disastrous way to think and a perfectly disastrous way to operate in the world.

The best thing a human being can do is to help another human being know more.

I have three basic rules. Meeting all three is nearly impossible, but you should try anyway:

Don’t sell anything you wouldn’t buy yourself.
Don’t work for anyone you don’t respect and admire.
Work only with people you enjoy.

I have been incredibly fortunate in my life: with Warren I had all three.

Invest in a business any fool can run, because someday a fool will. If it won't stand a little mismanagement, it's not much of a business.

Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome.

It's not supposed to be easy. Anyone who finds it easy is stupid.

You'll do better if you have passion for something in which you have aptitude. If Warren had gone into ballet, no one would have heard of him.

The first rule of compounding: Never interrupt it unnecessarily.

What do you want to avoid? Such an easy answer: sloth and unreliability.

A lot of success in life and business comes from knowing what you want to avoid: early death, a bad marriage, etc..

Good businesses are ethical businesses. A business model that relies on trickery is doomed to fail.

Remember that reputation and integrity are your most valuable assets – and can be lost in a heartbeat.

All I want to know is where I'm going to die, so I'll never go there.