Most people think that if they just had more information, they'd make better decisions. But the problem is rarely a lack of information — it's that we don't want to believe what the information is telling us.

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.

We do not see nature with our eyes, but with our understandings and our hearts. To a man who is indifferent to beauty, the Sistine ceiling is only paint on plaster.

The risk of paying too high a price for good-quality stocks is not the chief hazard for the thoughtful, enterprising investor — his chief hazard is the adoption of unsound principles or inapplicable methods under conditions of excitement and stress.

The universe is a harmony of tensions, like that of the bow and the lyre. It is in the opposition of things that the finest attunement is found, and from things that differ comes the most beautiful concord.

The demand of the human intellect is for a world in which something is permanently true. Science gives us a world in which everything is provisionally true — which is not at all the same thing.

Most people think of risk as the probability of losing money. But the real risk is behaving in a way today that prevents you from being in the game tomorrow. Permanent impairment of capital is far less common than permanent impairment of judgment under pressure.

We are reluctant to believe that the world we see is not the whole world. Yet the history of knowledge is largely the history of such reluctance being overcome.

The ability to destroy your ideas rapidly instead of slowly when the occasion is right is one of the most valuable things you can have. You have to work hard on it. Ask yourself what are the arguments on the other side. It's bad to have an opinion you're proud of if you can't state the other side better than your opponents.

We are apt to think that our ideas are the spontaneous product of the mind working upon experience; but in truth our ideas are largely the inheritance of past thought, and the experience upon which they work is itself colored by inherited assumptions.

The truth is that we never know for certain about anything. The degree of assurance we feel about any proposition is not a measure of its truth, but a measure of our familiarity with the evidence bearing on it.

The river itself has no beginning or end. In its beginning, it is not yet the river; in its end, it is no longer the river. What we call the headwaters is only a convention of cartographers.

We are compelled to feel that the world presented to our senses is not the world as it really is, but only the world as it appears to beings constituted as we are. The thing in itself remains forever unknowable.

The stock market is filled with individuals who know the price of everything, but the value of nothing. A great company is not a great investment if you pay too much for it — and a mediocre company can be a fine investment if you buy it cheaply enough.

We are in the habit of imagining our lives to be linear, a long march from birth to death. In fact, they are composed of thousands of days, each one a world in itself.

The botanist who studies the flora of a distant country is compelled to admit that the very plants which seem most strikingly unlike anything in his own country are, when he comes to know them, simply variations of types with which he is perfectly familiar.

We shall not grow wiser before we learn that much that we have done was very foolish.

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 art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.

Invert, always invert: Turn a situation or problem upside down. Look at it backwards. What happens if all our plans go wrong? Where do we not want to go, and how do you get there? Instead of asking how to succeed, ask how to guarantee failure—then avoid it.

Mimicking the herd invites regression to the mean. Unconventional behavior is the only road to superior investment results, but it isn't for everyone. Uncomfortably idiosyncratic positions can result in short-term performance that is worse than the market or peers.

The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition.

It is not enough to be busy; so are the ants. The question is: what are we busy about?

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men — that is genius.

The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as the sculptor works on his block of stone. In a sense the statue stood there from eternity. But there were a thousand different ones beside it in the same stone, and the sculptor alone is to thank for having extricated this one from the rest.

The difficulty lies not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.

The best investment is in the business that compounds the fastest while requiring the least capital. Most people think about return on capital. They should think about return on capital per unit of risk taken.

The mind is furnished with a set of instincts which seek out certain kinds of phenomena and ask for explanations of certain kinds of things. Any answer to a question which does not ask or explain the right kind of thing will be philosophically frustrated and dull.

The best chance of success is to buy something that is so good that even a fool can run it. Because sooner or later, a fool will.

The big money is not in the buying and selling, but in the waiting. Patience is the virtue that is most rewarded in investing.

The best thing for your own mind is to be exposed relentlessly to smart people who disagree with you.

The best way to destroy the last vestige of intellectual freedom is to assume that it doesn't matter, or that the problems it solves are unimportant because they aren't commercial. The truth is that the best part of intellectual work is never commercial.

The mind is like a river. While it flows, it is never the same water; and while it thinks, it is never the same thought.

The mind does not work by way of ideas, but by way of passionate preferences; we do not see nature, we see our idea of nature.

The biggest investing errors come not from companies that fail, but from companies that succeed in ways you didn't anticipate. You prepare for the future by studying how the past was different from what people expected.

The mind has not merely made a discovery of external fact; it has altered its own character by the attempt to know external fact.