“The thing that I have been emphasizing in my own work for the last few years has been the group approach. To try to buy groups of stocks that meet some simple criterion for being undervalued-regardless of the industry and with very little attention to the individual company.”

When somebody asserts that a stock has an earning power of so much, I am sure that the person who hears him doesn’t know what he means, and there is a good chance that the man who uses it doesn’t know what it means.

Confronted with a challenge to distill the secret of sound investment into three words, we venture the motto, Margin of Safety.

Even defensive portfolios should be changed from time to time, especially if the securities purchased have an apparently excessive advance and can be replaced by issues much more reasonable priced.

The purpose of this book is to supply, in the form suitable for laymen, guidance in the adoption and execution of an investment policy.

The investor’s chief problem – and even his worst enemy – is likely to be himself.

Always buy your straw hats in the Winter

Those with the enterprise lack the money and those with the money lack the enterprise to buy stocks when they are cheap.

The beauty of periodic rebalancing is that it forces you to base your investing decisions on a simple, objective standard.

The people of the United States will not tolerate another deep depression that arises not from any lack of natural resources, productive capacity or man and brain power, but solely from imperfections in the functioning of the system of finance capitalism.

Confusing speculation with investment is always a mistake.

The market is a pendulum that forever swings between unsustainable optimism (which makes stocks too expensive) and unjustified pessimism (which makes them too cheap). The intelligent investor is a realist who sells to optimists and buys from pessimists.

Wall Street people learn nothing and forget everything.

The best values today are often found in the stocks that were once hot and have since gone cold.

Thus the important and difficult part of sound investment, which hinges upon the investor’s own temperament and attitude, is not much affected by the passing years.

For 99 issues out of 100 we could say that at some price they are cheap enough to buy and at some price they would be so dear that they would be sold.

In the short-run, the market is a voting machine – reflecting a voter-registration test that requires only money, not intelligence or emotional stability – but in the long- run, the market is a weighing machine.

Unlike dragons, I love spicy salsa. In fact, the spicier the better.

I like crunchy, Tex-Mex, cheese-slathered too, but I prefer to keep it simple.

The stakes are so high just for someone to make a simple exit.

In Chekhov, when people leave, a carriage is taking them away forever.

I’m not sexist, I’m just a realist.

The sin of capitalism, perhaps, is to make wants feel like needs, to give to simple silly stuff the urgency of near-physical necessity: I must have it.

I don’t care if people think I’m gay. I know I’m not, so it doesn’t bother me.

It struck me that our history is contained in the home we live in, that we are shaped by the ability of these simple structures to resist being defiled