If only I had the influence with my wife and children that I have in some other quarters!

If you get into the mental habit of relating what you're reading to the basic structure of the underlying ideas being demonstrated, you gradually accumulate some wisdom.

Failure to handle psychological denial is a common way for people to go broke: you have made an enormous commitment to something. You have poured effort and money in. And the more you put in, the more that the whole consistency principle makes you think, "Now it has to work. If I put in just a little more, then it will work."

Black-Scholes works for short-term options, but if it's a long-term option and you think you know something [about the underlying asset], it's insane to use Black-Scholes.

There must be some wisdom in the folk saying: Its the strong swimmers who drown.

If you have the opportunities of Berkshire, an investment in gold is dumb.

Berkshire's whole record has been achieved without paying one ounce of attention to the efficient market theory in its hard form. And not one ounce of attention to the descendants of that idea, which came out of academic economics and went into corporate finance and morphed into such obscenities as the capital asset pricing model, which we also paid no attention to. I think you'd have to believe in the tooth fairy to believe that you could easily outperform the market by seven-percentage points per annum just by investing in high volatility stocks.