Quote collection
517 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"You have to know accounting. It's the language of practical business life. It was a very useful thing to deliver to civilization. I've heard it came to civilization through Venice which of course was once the great commercial power in the Mediterranean. However, double entry bookkeeping was a hell of an invention."
"The best thing a human being can do is to help another human being know more."
"Intelligent people make decisions based on opportunity costs."
"What do you want to avoid? Such an easy answer: sloth and unreliability. If you're unreliable it doesn't matter what your virtues are. You're going to crater immediately. Doing what you have faithfully engaged to do should be an automatic part of your conduct. You want to avoid sloth and unreliability."
"Mimicking the herd invites regression to the mean."
"I did not succeed in life by intelligence. I succeeded because I have a long attention span."
"Creative accounting is an absolute curse to a civilization. One could argue that double-entry bookkeeping was one of history's great advances. Using accounting for fraud and folly is a disgrace. In a democracy, it often takes a scandal to trigger reform. Enron was the most obvious example of a business culture gone wrong in a long, long time."
"The big money is not in the buying and selling ... but in the waiting."
"Great investing requires a lot of delayed gratification."
"I'm not entitled to have an opinion unless I can state the arguments against my position better than the people who are in opposition. I think that I am qualified to speak only when I've reached that state."
"When you locate a bargain, you must ask, 'Why me, God? Why am I the only one who could find this bargain?'"
"I believe in the discipline of mastering the best that other people have ever figured out. I don't believe in just sitting down and trying to dream it all up yourself. Nobody's that smart."
"Our job is to find a few intelligent things to do, not to keep up with every damn thing in the world."
"A lot of success in life and business comes from knowing what you want to avoid: early death, a bad marriage, etc."
"The idea of caring is that someone is making money faster [than you are] is one of the deadly sins. Envy is a really stupid sin because it’s the only one you could never possibly have any fun at. There’s a lot of pain and no fun. Why would you want to get on that trolley?"
"In my whole life, I have known no wise people who didn't read all the time - none ... ZERO."
"There are two kinds of businesses: The first earns 12%, and you can take it out at the end of the year. The second earns 12%, but all the excess cash must be reinvested - there's never any cash. It reminds me of the guy who looks at all of his equipment and says, 'There's all of my profit.' We hate that kind of business."
"Whenever you think something or some person is ruining your life, it's you. A victimization mentality is so debilitating."
"No wise pilot, no matter how great his talent and experience, fails to use his checklist."
"I think that, every time you saw the word EBITDA, you should substitute the word "bullshit" earnings."