The 50 Best Warren Buffett Quotes on Investing, Business & Life

Warren Buffett's quotes are as legendary as his investment returns. Over sixty years in the public eye, the Oracle of Omaha has distilled complex investment and business principles into memorable one-liners that have been shared millions of times. Below are some of the most powerful and instructive quotes, organized by theme — each one a condensed lesson from the most successful investor who ever lived.

On investing fundamentals, Buffett is both poetic and precise. "Price is what you pay. Value is what you get." "Rule No. 1: Never lose money. Rule No. 2: Never forget Rule No. 1." "The stock market is a device for transferring money from the impatient to the patient." "Only buy something that you'd be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years." "Risk comes from not knowing what you're doing." "It's far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price." "Our favorite holding period is forever." "Opportunities come infrequently. When it rains gold, put out the bucket, not the thimble." "The most important quality for an investor is temperament, not intellect." "Be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful."

On business and competitive advantage, he cuts through complexity with clarity. "In business, I look for economic castles protected by unbreachable moats." "It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it." "Only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked." "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." "I try to buy stock in businesses that are so wonderful that an idiot can run them. Because sooner or later, one will." "Time is the friend of the wonderful company, the enemy of the mediocre." "Your premium brand had better be delivering something special, or it's not going to get the business."

On life and success, Buffett is characteristically warm and direct. "Someone's sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago." "In the world of business, the people who are most successful are those who are doing what they love." "The best investment you can make is in yourself." "Honesty is a very expensive gift. Don't expect it from cheap people." "It is not necessary to do extraordinary things to get extraordinary results." "Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken." "The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything." "Tell me who your heroes are and I'll tell you how you'll turn out to be."

On wealth and giving, the world's greatest capitalist reveals his philosophy of stewardship. "If you're in the luckiest 1% of humanity, you owe it to the rest of humanity to think about the other 99%." "I want to give my kids just enough so that they would feel that they could do anything, but not so much that they would feel like doing nothing." "My wealth has come from a combination of living in America, some lucky genes, and compound interest." Each of these quotes encapsulates years of hard-won wisdom into a single sentence — a gift from a man who has spent his entire life thinking clearly about money, business, and what truly matters.