The single greatest edge an investor can have is a long-term orientation. Most of the competition is focused on the next quarter; if you can honestly say you don't care about the next three years, you've already eliminated most of your rivals before the game begins.

The one thing I would say is that the optimal amount of hassle and stress is not zero. Eliminating all friction is often the goal, but a life or portfolio with no friction is also one with no growth, no learning, and no resilience. The question is which frictions are worth tolerating.

The best businessmen I've ever known were all great simplifiers. They had an uncanny ability to cut through the noise and find the one or two variables that really mattered — and then they just ignored everything else. Most people drown in complexity they created themselves.

You don't get rewarded for taking risk; you get rewarded for buying cheap assets. And if the assets you bought got pushed up in price simply because they were risky, then there's no real margin of safety in owning them.

Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years. But the rarer error — the one that actually destroys wealth — is mistaking a temporary edge for a permanent one and pressing it long past its expiration date.

The sailor does not control the sea, nor does the saint control his conscience. They are what they are; and for that very reason there is a wall between them and the things they move through, which can never be dissolved while they live.

Risk means more things can happen than will happen. The gap between those two things is where most investment mistakes are made — not from bad analysis, but from assuming the future is narrower than it actually is.

The best thing a human being can do is to help another human being know more. But the vast majority of what gets taught in school is not actionable — it's meant to signal that you're educated, not to help you think. The moment you realize school is mostly about certification, not education, you can start actually learning.

Invert, always invert. Many hard problems are best solved only when they are addressed backwards. The way complex adaptive systems work and the way mental constructs overlap, problems frequently become easier to solve if you turn them around in reverse.

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.

The function of the imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things strange.

Most people think that finding a hot stock is investing. Finding a stock that is cheap is not enough; you also need a catalyst — something that will actually cause the price to reflect the value. Without a catalyst, you can be right and still lose money for years.

The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed, in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.

The record of the past is used to justify the present, but the future is where the real money is made. Most investors spend 95% of their time studying history and 5% imagining what the world could become — and then wonder why they keep buying things that have already happened.

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and being aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. If you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.

The best business returns are usually achieved by companies that are doing something that it's relatively easy to do, but that has a moat around it — and the moat is usually not a patent, it's usually a network effect or a cost advantage or something that's very hard to replicate.

Most people think diversification means owning many things. But the real diversification that matters is diversification across time — being able to survive long enough that the math works in your favor. Staying power is the asset most investors forget to buy.

It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question. And to ask the right question is already to know the direction of the answer.

The difference between a good business and a bad business is that good businesses throw up one easy decision after another. The bad ones give you horrible choices — decisions where every option has a serious downside.

The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do. And the most dangerous of all follies is to mistake the map for the territory.

The question is not what you look at, but what you see. It is only necessary to behold the least fact or phenomenon, however familiar, from a point a hair's breadth aside from our habitual path, to be overcome by its strangeness and wonder.

We are compelled to feel that the world of our experience is not the world of reality, and yet it is only through the world of experience that we can come to know any world at all.

It is not always by plugging away at a difficulty and sticking to it that one overcomes it; often it is by working on the one next to it. Some things and some people have to be approached obliquely, at an angle.

Most people think that if they just had more information, they'd make better decisions. But the limiting factor is almost never information — it's the willingness to act decisively on incomplete information while others are still waiting for certainty that will never come.

The fish trap exists because of the fish. Once you've gotten the fish you can forget the trap. Words exist because of meaning. Once you've gotten the meaning, you can forget the words. Where can I find a man who has forgotten words so that I can talk with him?

The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent, but the deeper truth is that most investors go broke not from bad timing but from borrowing money to express a correct opinion too early. Leverage transforms a right idea into a ruin.

We are always acting on what has just finished happening, and reflecting on what is about to begin. The moment of pure presence is always receding.

The tendency of modern science is to reduce all natural phenomena to the action of matter, and to explain the complex by the simple. But this tendency has its dangers; it may lead us to forget that the simple is always an abstraction, and that the real world is infinitely complex.

Diversification is protection against ignorance. It makes very little sense for those who know what they're doing.

It is not enough for the historian to know what happened; he must also understand what did not happen, and why it did not happen.

The chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken. Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when you woke up. Discharge your duties faithfully and well. Step by step you get ahead, but not necessarily in fast spurts.

We do not see nature with our eyes, but with our understandings and our hearts. He who has learned to love a flower has learned something of the secret of being at home in the world.

The best investors I've known don't just have high IQs — they have the rare ability to sit with unresolved questions for years without being compelled to act. Premature certainty is the enemy of superior returns.

It is not so much that man has evolved from the ape, as that both have evolved from a common ancestor — and the difference between a man who sees this and one who does not is not a difference of knowledge, but of imagination.

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

It is a great mistake to think that the motive which leads a man to seek knowledge is always a desire for it. Much more often it is a desire for certainty, and the two are very different things.

The key to investing is not assessing how much an industry is going to affect society, or how much it will grow, but rather determining the competitive advantage of any given company and, above all, the durability of that advantage. The products or services that have wide, sustainable moats around them are the ones that deliver rewards to investors.

It is not the horse that draws the cart, but the oats. And yet we speak of the horse as the cause of motion, and the oats as mere fuel. So we misread almost every force that moves us.

The demand for certainty is one which is natural to man, but is nevertheless an intellectual vice. If you take your hypothesis seriously enough, it will generate predictions; and if the predictions are wrong, you must abandon the hypothesis. To seek for certainty where the subject-matter does not permit it is to mistake the nature of the inquiry.

The great end of life is not knowledge but action. What men need is as much knowledge as they can organize for action; give them more and it may become injurious. Some men are heavy and stupid from undigested learning.

The dealer's hand is the most important hand at the table, yet most investors spend all their time analyzing the other players. In markets, you must understand what the seller knows that you don't — not just what you believe the asset is worth.

We are not troubled by things, but by the opinions which we have of things. When, therefore, we are hindered, or disturbed, or grieved, let us never blame others, but ourselves — that is, our own opinions.

The beginning of wisdom is the discovery that there exist contradictions of permanent tension with which it is not possible to live at peace but with which it is not possible to live at all without them.

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit — yet habit itself is the enemy of wonder, and wonder is the beginning of philosophy.