The difference between a good business and a great one is that a great business throws up one easy decision after another. A good business makes you think hard every day about whether the economics still make sense.

We are always paid for our suspicion by finding what we suspect. The universe is wider than our views of it, and we should look not merely through a knothole, but with our whole head out of the gable.

The inability to delay satisfaction is the most destructive force in business. Most companies die not from a single catastrophic decision but from the accumulated cost of choosing the comfortable option over the correct one, thousands of times.

The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it. Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking. But mark this: do not say that thinking makes it so — for the brute who thinks nothing at all is happier than the man who thinks himself into despair.

Invert, always invert. Many hard problems are best solved when you turn them around in reverse. Tell me where I'm going to die, so I never go there.

The stock market is filled with individuals who know the price of everything, but the value of nothing. Prices are set at the margin by the most motivated seller and the most motivated buyer — and neither is representative of rational long-term value.

The silly question is the first intimation of some totally new development. If someone had asked Newton why apples fell downward rather than sideward, Newton might have reflected on this sufficiently to arrive at the concept of universal gravitation.

We are continually faced with great opportunities which are brilliantly disguised as unsolvable problems.

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. Yet the most dangerous habit is the habit of certainty — for it closes the very faculties by which excellence is sustained.

Forecasts may tell you a great deal about the forecaster; they tell you nothing about the future.

Mimicking the herd invites regression to the mean. The problem is not just that everyone owns the same securities; it's that everyone has internalized the same reasons for owning them, and will therefore sell at the same time for the same reasons.

Capitalism is a system for generating testable hypotheses about value. Most hypotheses fail. The error isn't in failing — it's in refusing to run the experiment cheaply enough that failure remains survivable.

The best business returns are usually achieved by companies that are doing something that it's hard or impossible for you to do to them. Every year they get harder and harder to compete with. They have an ever-widening moat around their castle, and the key is not 'how big is the castle today?' but 'what is the trajectory of the moat?'

The naturalist is not the man who observes most, but the man who is most astonished by what he observes. To see the ordinary with extraordinary eyes — that is the whole of science.

The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence itself, but to act with yesterday's logic.

The market is a device for transferring money from the impatient to the patient. But what most people miss is that patience itself is a skill — one that must be practiced under conditions specifically designed to make you abandon it.

The biggest mistake investors make is to believe that what happened in the recent past is likely to persist. They assume that something that was a good investment in the recent past is still a good investment. Typically, high past returns simply mean that an asset has become more expensive and is a poorer, not better, investment.

To have a great idea, have a lot of them — and be ruthless enough to kill the ones you love. The fertility of the mind depends on forgetting as much as on remembering.

Invest in a business any fool can run, because someday a fool will. If it requires a genius to run it, it's not going to work out well for the shareholder.

The biggest source of investment error is not ignorance of finance or economics. It's the failure to understand that you are not the market — you are a person with a history, with fears, with a need to feel smart. The market doesn't know you exist, and it certainly doesn't care about your thesis.

The beginning of wisdom is the discovery that there exist contradictions of permanent tension with which it is necessary to live and that it is above all not necessary to seek to resolve.

The worst investments I've seen are not the ones made in bad businesses. They are the ones made in good businesses at bad prices, by people who confused the quality of the asset with the quality of the investment.

Most people think that if they just had more information, they'd make better decisions. But the problem is rarely informational — it's structural. The question isn't 'what do I know?' but 'what am I incentivized to see?'

The moment we cease to take stock of what is habitual, we begin to understand what is possible. Most men mistake the ruts of their days for the roads of their destiny.

It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question. A question is a net cast into the unknown; the answer is only what the net happens to catch.

The tendency of the casual mind is to pick out or stumble upon a sample which supports or defies its prejudices, and then to make it the representative of a whole class.

The biggest investing errors come not from factors that are informational or analytical, but from those that are psychological. Investors who are right for the wrong reasons are dangerous to themselves and their portfolios, because being right for the wrong reasons produces no dependable edge.

It is not the going out of port, but the coming in, that determines the success of a voyage. And yet we judge a life by its disasters, not by the quiet harbors it never left.

Risk means more things can happen than will happen. The gap between those two things is where most investment mistakes live — people confuse a good outcome with a good decision, and a bad outcome with a bad decision.

The universe is transformation; life is opinion. Things do not touch the soul, for they are external and remain without; but our perturbations come only from the opinion which is within.

Accounting is the language of business, and you have to be as comfortable with that language as you are with your native tongue. But accounting is only a tool — the map is not the territory, and the numbers are not the business. The danger is mistaking precision for accuracy.

The universe is wider than our views of it. Yet we should oftener look over the taffrail of our craft like curious passengers, and not make the voyage like stupid sailors picking oakum.

We are always acting on what has just finished happening. It happened at least 1/30th of a second ago. We think we're in the present, but we aren't. The present we know is only a movie of the past.

Invert, always invert. Many hard problems are best solved by asking what you want to avoid, not what you want to achieve. Most people ask 'how do I succeed?' when they should be asking 'what guarantees failure?'

The thing that astonishes me is that the geologists and biologists seem quite unaware of the philosophical chaos that underlies their own work — they proceed as though the universe were already explained, and their only task were to fill in the details.

Mimicking the herd invites regression to the mean. The problem is not just that you end up average — it's that you've taken on all the risk of being wrong while surrendering any chance of being interestingly right. Consensus is the enemy of asymmetric returns.

You only have to be right a few times in your life, as long as you don't make too many big mistakes in between. The asymmetry between gains and losses means that avoiding catastrophe is more important than scoring victories.

The moment we have a fixed idea, we cease to be curious. And the moment we cease to be curious, we have ceased to think. For thought, like water, must flow or it stagnates.

Mimicking the herd invites regression to the mean. The problem is that most investors feel safest when they are most in danger — when asset prices are high and everyone agrees the future is bright. Safety, paradoxically, is found in the places that make you most uncomfortable.

Most people can't distinguish between 'this is hard' and 'this is impossible.' That confusion kills more good ideas than competition ever will. The question is never whether something is hard—it's whether the difficulty is structural or merely unfamiliar.

The hardest thing to see is what is in front of your eyes. And yet, when you have seen it, the whole world is altered.