28 Warren Buffett Quotes Offering a Peak Into the Mind and Background of the Iconic Investor

Investor at age 11 and the richest man in the world at 78, Warren Buffett started his career as a paper-boy, earning money before going to school in the mornings; money that he went on to invest in stocks. Ready to become a businessman after high school at the age of 16, the young Buffett was convinced by his father to go to college first.

After college attending the university was the natural next step. However, the young Buffett flunked the interview for Harvard and subsequently realized he had to work on his social skills.

Having remedied this using Dale Carnegie’s method described in the book How to Win Friends & Influence People, Buffett went on to become a millionaire at the age of 30, billionaire in 1985 and eventually the richest man in the world in 2008.

These Warren Buffett quotes are a window into the mind of the photographic memory wonder kid with a certain love of numbers, who combined his gift with inspiring work ethics and self-improvement to become the richest person in the world.

“My aunt gave me a world almanac, so I memorized the population of all cities of any real size. I just like numbers. It’s not limited to business numbers at all”

– Warren Buffett

“I used to buy a Coca-Cola six-pack for a quarter and sell them for a nickel each. I sold the Saturday Evening Post door to door. I sold Ladies Home Journal. I had all kinds of little ventures, not all hugely successful I might add. I liked doing business early on”

– Warren Buffett

“I delivered about 500 000 papers, and made a about a penny a piece. So I made about $5 000 delivering papers”

– Warren Buffett

“[Benjamin] Graham would tell you that the market is there to serve you, not to inform you. And basically he would tell you that sometimes the market will be very, very wrong. And if you look at stock prices as buying pieces of businesses, you will be able to recognize when the market is very wrong”

– Warren Buffett

“My sales pitch wasn’t very effective. I was 20 years old, I looked like I was about 16 and probably behaved like I was about twelve”

– Warren Buffett

“I had to communicate with people better. I couldn’t go through life afraid of public speaking and I’d heard about the Dale Carnegie course”

– Warren Buffett

“I had the intellect to succeed, but I didn’t have the persona”

– Warren Buffett

“Be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful”

– Warren Buffett

“Find your passion. I was very, very lucky to have found it when I was seven or eight years old. Fortunately my children have found their passion. One son loves farming like nothing else, one son loves music, and all three of them love philanthropy and what they get to do. You are lucky in life when you find it”

– Warren Buffett

“You are lucky in life when you find your passion”

– Warren Buffett

“Take the job that you would take if you were independently wealthy, and you’re going to do well at it”

– Warren Buffett

“Three things when hiring people: Look for integrity, intelligence and energy”

– Warren Buffett

“It never bothered me if people disagreed with what I thought as long as I felt that I knew the facts”

– Warren Buffett

“There is a whole bunch of things I don’t know a thing about; I just stay away from those”

– Warren Buffett

“I stay within what I call my ‘circle of confidence’”

– Warren Buffett

“I’m no genius, but I’m smart in spots and I stay around those spots”

– Warren Buffett

“I don’t have a problem if someone says ‘you’re wrong’, I go back and look at the facts. I think that really is much more important, frankly, than having a few points of IQ or an extra course or two in school or anything of the sort. You need emotional stability”

– Warren Buffett

“I just read and read and read. I probably read five to six hours a day”

– Warren Buffett

“I was terrified of speaking in public”

– Warren Buffett

“Every two years, I write them [the CEOs] a very simple letter, a page and a half. I don’t believe in a 200-page manual, because if you put out a 200-page manual, everyone is looking for loopholes”

– Warren Buffett

“We have all the money we need, but we don’t have an ounce of reputation beyond what we need. And we can’t afford to lose it”

– Warren Buffett

“We will never trade our reputation away for money”

– Warren Buffett

“I want them [the CEOs] to judge every action by how it would appear on the front page of their local news paper, written by a smart but semi-unfriendly reporter, who really understood it, to be read by their families, their neighbors, their friends. And it has to pass that test”

– Warren Buffett

“When you find bad news, I say: Get it right, get it fast, get it out, get it over”

– Warren Buffett

“You’re going to get bad news. I got 330 000 people. I mean; I will guarantee you that probably dozens of them are doing something wrong right now. I just hope I find out about it early”

– Warren Buffett

“The headline is what 10 000 as many people are going to carry around in their mind later on, as the story”

– Warren Buffett

“The panic of 2008 had been far worse if JPMorgan hadn’t been there, and Jaime Dimon hadn’t been running it”

– Warren Buffett

“I just have a great time every day, getting to do exactly what I want to do in life. And it doesn’t get any better than that”

– Warren Buffett

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