It is not the going out of port, but the coming in, that determines the success of a voyage. And so it is with the long voyage of life — but how seldom do we think of this when we are young, and planning our first departure!

The best way to think about how markets work is to imagine a voting machine in the short run and a weighing machine in the long run — but most people spend their entire careers trying to win votes instead of actual weight.

The best single question to ask about any moat is: 'In ten years, will this business be harder or easier to compete with?' Most analysts ask about next quarter's margins. That's why most analysts are wrong about compounding.

Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years. Compounding is not just a financial concept — it applies to knowledge, relationships, and reputation. The problem is that compounding looks like nothing is happening, right up until it looks like everything is happening.

Forgetting that your returns depend on the returns of the businesses you own—not on what you paid for them—is the source of more investment error than almost any other mistake I can think of. You must always ask: what will this business earn over time? Everything else is noise.

Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years. But the subtler error is assuming the next ten years will look like the last ten — the truly dangerous assumption for any investor or builder.

The single greatest edge an investor can have is a long-term orientation that other investors are structurally unable to match. Most investors are forced by their mandates, their clients, or their own psychology to think in quarters. If you can genuinely think in decades, you are not playing the same game they are.

It is not the going out of port, but the coming in, that determines the success of a voyage.

The best business returns are usually achieved by companies that are doing something quite similar today to what they were doing five or ten years ago. That is no accident.

Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years. But the deeper error is that they plan in one-year chunks at all — the unit of compounding is decades, not quarters.

The single greatest edge an investor can have is a long-term orientation that isn't merely stated but is structurally enforced — meaning your capital, your clients, and your own psychology are all aligned so that you literally cannot sell at the wrong time.

The greatest competitive advantage in business is a long time horizon. Almost all of the gains in any market come from people willing to wait longer than everyone else is willing to wait, and almost nobody is structurally set up to do that.

Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years. The long-term compounder who does nothing dramatic usually beats the person executing a brilliant short-term strategy.

The best thing a company can do is compound capital efficiently over a long period of time. Everything else is details.

The best thing a company can do is compound capital efficiently over a long period of time. That's what creates shareholder value. Most companies don't do it because they're distracted by quarterly earnings, acquisitions that destroy value, or just bad capital allocation decisions.

The best thing a company can do is compound capital efficiently over decades. Everything else is noise.

The best thing a company can do is to be a wonderful place to work and to create products and services that genuinely improve people's lives. Most companies optimize for the wrong thing—they optimize for quarterly earnings instead of for the long-term health of the business and the satisfaction of their customers.

The task of the excellent teacher is to stimulate 'apparently ordinary' people to unusual effort over many years.

The big difference between what I do and what a lot of people in the hedge fund world do is that I actually think about the economics of the business, whereas a lot of people are just trying to make a quick buck.