“No statement is more true and better applicable to Wall Street than the famous warning of Santayana: “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it”.”

Buy when most people, including experts, are pessimistic, and sell when they are actively optimistic.

Investing isn’t about beating others at their game. It’s about controlling yourself at your own game.

By refusing to pay too much for an investment, you minimize the chances that your wealth will ever disappear or suddenly be destroyed.

If I have noticed anything over these 60 years on Wall Street, it is that people do not succeed in forecasting what`s going to happen to the stock market.

The volume of credit depends upon three factors: the desire to borrow, the ability to lend and the desire to lend.

We urge the beginner in security buying not to waste his efforts and his money in trying to beat the market. Let him study security values and initially test out his judgment on price versus value with the smallest possible sums.

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.

In the old legend the wise men finally boiled down the history of mortal affairs into a single phrase: ‘This too will pass.’

Nearly everyone interested in common stocks wants to be told by someone else what he thinks the market is going to do. The demand being there, it must be supplied.

While enthusiasm may be necessary for great accomplishments elsewhere, on Wall Street it almost invariably leads to disaster

Losing some money is an inevitable part of investing, and there’s nothing you can do to prevent it. But to be an intelligent investor, you must take responsibility for ensuring that you never lose most or all of your money.

THERE is widespread agreement among economists that abuse of credit constitutes one of the chief unwholesome elements in business booms and is mainly responsible for the ensuing crash and depression.

Experience teaches that the time to buy stocks is when their price is unduly depressed by temporary adversity. In other words, they should be bought on a bargain basis or not at all.

It’s nonsensical to derive a price/earnings ratio by dividing the known current price by unknown future earnings.

The qualitative factors upon which most stress is laid are the nature of the business and the character of the management. These elements are exceedingly important, but they are also exceedingly difficult to deal with intelligently.

The value of any investment is, and always must be, a function of the price you pay for it.

Price fluctuations have only one significant meaning for the true investor. They provide him with an opportunity to buy wisely when prices fall sharply and to sell wisely when they advance a great deal.

Successful investing professionals are disciplined and consistent and they think a great deal about what they do and how they do it.

Buy not on optimism, but on arithmetic.

The investor who permits himself to be stampeded or unduly worried by unjustified market declines in his holdings is perversely transforming his basic advantage into a basic disadvantage.

High valuations entail high risks.

The distinction between investment and speculation in common stocks has always been a useful one and its disappearance is cause for concern.

Wall Street has a few prudent principles; the trouble is that they are always forgotten when they are most needed.

The memory of the financial community is proverbially and distressingly short.