10 Great Quotes from the World’s Best Investors

Ever so often I go review my favorite quotes from some of the world’s best investors. I always find it incredible how such pithy comments can exude so much wisdom, and it always reminds me to reorient my thinking or actions in some way. Additionally, despite being investors first and foremost, these individuals have plenty of worldly wisdom to share — from investing to business to life in general.

As you read through these quotes, think not only about the direct investing lessons but also about the deeper implications they share:

From Warren Buffett:

• “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.”
• “I am a better investor because I am a businessman, and a better businessman because I am an investor.”

From Charlie Munger:

• “One of the greatest ways to avoid trouble is to keep it simple. When you make it vastly complicated — and only a few high priests in each department can pretend to understand it — what you’re going to find all too often is that those high priests don’t really understand it at all…. The system often goes out of control.”
• “I constantly see people rise in life who are not the smartest, sometimes not even the most diligent, but they are learning machines. They go to bed every night a little wiser than they were when they got up and boy does that help, particularly when you have a long run ahead of you.”

From David Gardner:

• “Make your portfolio reflect your best vision for our future.”
• “I try to find excellence, buy excellence, and add to excellence over time. I sell mediocrity. That’s how I invest.”

From Peter Lynch:

• “The real key to making money in stocks is not to get scared out of them.”
• “Everyone has the brainpower to follow the stock market. If you made it through fifth-grade math, you can do it.”

From Howard Marks:

• “You can’t do the same things others do and expect to outperform.”
• “Asymmetry — better performance on the upside than on the downside relative to what your style alone would produce — should be every investor’s goal.”

As you can see, each investor has unique insights to share, and if you dig a little deeper common themes begin to emerge. Successful investing captures knowledge from a wide range of topics and fields, and learnings from investing apply to other realms as well. Integrity, simplicity, psychology, optimism, simple math, discipline — it’s all there. If you’re not investing, we always encourage you to begin as soon as you can, but whether you are able to invest or not I highly suggest taking the time to learn from some of the world’s smartest investors. You’ll absolutely come out a better thinker in the end — and you’ll probably make better decisions (financial and otherwise) in the end.

Don’t know where to begin? Here are some simple starting points for each of the gentlemen above…

• Warren Buffett — Berkshire Hathaway’s Annual Shareholder Letters
• Charlie Munger — Poor Charlie’s Almanack
• David Gardner — Rule Breaker Investing (podcast)
• Peter Lynch — One Up on Wall Street
• Howard Marks — Oaktree Capital’s Memos

Interested in starting investing? Check out our 5 Steps to Start Investing.