We are more often frightened than hurt; and we suffer more in imagination than in reality.

Nothing in the universe can travel at the speed of light, they say, forgetful of the shadow's speed.

A stock is not just a ticker symbol or an electronic blip; it is an ownership interest in an actual business, with an underlying value that does not depend on its share price. The market is there to serve you, not to instruct you.

We are in the habit of imagining our lives to be linear, a long march from birth to death. But they are in fact constantly renewed, and the great events of our lives happen again and again.

The best investment you can make is in businesses you understand, and the second-best is in your own ability to understand more businesses. Most investors do neither — they buy what's rising and call it research.

It is not enough to be industrious; so are the ants. What are you industrious about?

The universe is a series of collapsed probabilities. What we call history is merely the thread that happened to hold — and we mistake the thread for the loom.

You have to be willing to look wrong for a long time before you look right. The market has no obligation to validate your thesis on your schedule.

Mimicking the herd invites regression to the mean. You will never produce a superior performance unless you do something different from the majority — and that is harder than it sounds, because the majority is usually wrong about enough things to be dangerous, but right about enough things to be seductive.

It is not the horse that draws the cart, but the oats. And yet we always speak of the horse.

Invert, always invert. Many hard problems are best solved when you turn them around in reverse. It is not enough to think about what you want — think equally hard about what you want to avoid, and you will find that removing stupidity is often more valuable than adding brilliance.

We are apt to think that our ideas and feelings are our own, and feel a sort of pride in them; but these we have been long accumulating, borrowing, stealing from the great store of the world's knowledge, and they are really the outcome of thousands of years of thought.

The best business returns are usually achieved by companies that are doing something that is quite easy to understand. The trick is getting first to a strong market position and then exploiting the advantages that follow. What you want is a natural franchise. A company can have a perfectly marvelous product and still be in a lousy business.

The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.

Risk means more things can happen than will happen. The practical definition of risk is not volatility or a standard deviation — it's the possibility of permanent loss of capital. Volatility is opportunity dressed in frightening clothes.

The record of a money manager who merely stays close to the market is not an outstanding record—it is a record of someone who has successfully rationalized doing nothing. The question is not whether you beat the market, but whether you had the intellectual honesty to know when you had no edge and the discipline to act accordingly.

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question. Déceler, c'est créer. To detect is to create.

A thought which does not result in an action is nothing much, and an action which does not proceed from a thought is nothing at all.

The market for something to believe in is infinite. But the market for something that actually works is much smaller, and far more competitive. Most investors confuse the two.

The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing, in so far as it stands ready against the accidental and the unforeseen, and is not apt to fall.

The ability to destroy value is not confined to bad businesses. A great business bought at too high a price, or managed by people who can't resist the temptation to allocate capital to adjacencies, will also destroy value. The label 'great business' is not a perpetual warranty.

Investors often make the mistake of confusing a exciting industry with a profitable one. The trick is not to find industries that are growing fast, but to find companies that can keep competitors from eating their lunch.

The best thing a human being can do is to help another human being know more. But most people, when they find something that works, hoard it. The great failure of capitalism is that the more valuable a piece of knowledge, the more people are incentivized to hide it.

The peculiarity of the evidence of mathematics is that all the argument is on one side. There are no objections, and no answers to objections. But on every subject on which difference of opinion is possible, the truth depends on a balance of two sets of reasons.

You don't need to recover what you've spent. You need to decide whether the future costs are worth the future benefits, completely independent of the past. The sunk cost fallacy is just the inability to make that distinction.

The multitude of men agree in this: that they equate thinking with reading, and spare themselves the trouble of thinking, because they are able to read. They thus very much resemble those who to escape from want have sold their heritage, and now hope to live by their wages from those who have acquired it.

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.

We do not see things as they are. We see them as we are. And when we change, all things change with us — not because the world has shifted, but because the lens through which we read it has.

The longing to behold this pre-established harmony is the source of the inexhaustible patience with which Spinoza must have waited for years to see his cherished conception of a mathematical proof of the existence of God.

A fact acquires its true and full value only through the idea which is developed from it.

The record of a man who makes consistently good decisions in complex situations is almost always a record of a man who has reduced the number of decisions he has to make. The more choices you face, the more your judgment degrades.

It is not enough to have a good mind; the main thing is to use it well. And the greatest minds are capable of the greatest vices as well as the greatest virtues.

We are more than half of what we are by imitation. The great point is to choose good models and to study them with care.

Mimicking the herd invites regression to the mean. You will never produce a superior investment record by buying what everybody else is buying. The decisions that look best in retrospect are often the ones that felt most uncomfortable at the time.

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 imply that an asset has become more expensive and is a less compelling investment.

The stock market is filled with individuals who know the price of everything, but the value of nothing. The secret to investing is to figure out the value of something — and then pay a lot less for it.

The best investors I know have a strong view about the future, but they hold it loosely — they're always looking for evidence that they're wrong. Conviction without flexibility is just stubbornness dressed up as confidence.