“An investment operation is one which, upon thorough analysis, promises safety of principal and an adequate return.”

The underlying principles of sound investment should not alter from decade to decade, but the application of these principles must be adapted to significant changes in the financial mechanisms and climate.

I am no longer an advocate of elaborate techniques of security analysis in order to find superior value opportunities.

The idea of storage as a solution of economic problems at least has the support of common sense.It is diametrically opposed to the topsy-turvy Alice-in-Wonderland reasoning that has marked so much of our depression thinking and policy.

In the financial markets, hindsight is forever 20/20, but foresight is legally blind. And thus, for most investors, market timing is a practical and emotional impossibility.

… the loss of public confidence in the financial community growing out of its own conduct in recent years. I insist that more damage has been done to stock values and to the future of equities from inside Wall Street than from outside Wall Street.

It is no difficult trick to bring a great deal of energy, study, and native ability into Wall Street and to end up with losses instead of profits. These virtues, if channeled in the wrong directions, become indistinguishable from handicaps.

It must be fundamentally wrong to reduce production of food and fiber while one-third of our population is still ill fed and ill clothed.

The market is always making mountains out of molehills and exaggerating ordinary vicissitudes into major setbacks.

There is a close logical connection between the concept of a safety margin and the principle of diversification.

You must never delude yourself into thinking that you’re investing when you’re speculating.

Both a priori reasoning and experience teach us that as as these funds grow larger the geometrical rate of growth by compound interest ultimately defeats itself.

As in roulette, same is true of the stock trader, who will find that the expense of trading weights the dice heavily against him.

Thousands of people have tried, and the evidence is clear: The more you trade, the less you keep.

In security analysis the prime stress is laid upon protection against untoward events. We obtain this protection by insisting upon margins of safety, or values well in excess of the price paid.

The investor’s primary interest lies in acquiring and holding suitable securities at suitable prices.

People who invest make money for themselves; people who speculate make money for their brokers. And that, in turn, is why Wall Street perennially downplays the durable virtues of investing and hypes the gaudy appeal of speculation.

He suffered from paralysis by analysis.

It had no practical application in his lifetime, but today, thanks to computers, is routinely used in the modelling of climate change, astrophysics and stock-market analysis.

Whether a tops-down or bottoms-up investor in bonds, stocks, or private equity, the standard analysis tends to judge an investor or his firm on the basis of how the bullish or bearish aspects of the cycle were managed.

My analysis was directed toward purely physical conditions, such as defective wiring, presence of lack of air spaces between metal flues and woodwork, etc., and the results were presented in these terms.

The ideal form of common stock analysis leads to a valuation of the issue which can be compared with the current price to determine whether or not the security is an attractive purchase.

We define a bargain issue as one which, on the basis of facts established by analysis, appears to be worth considerably more that it is selling for.

I was obsessed with this idea that these things that you collect, they just say so much about who you are. I can’t say it came from hard-nosed business analysis… It was just something I really want to see built.

Miracles are manifestations for which science has no definition, no analysis.