Good investing is a peculiar balance between the conviction to follow your ideas and the flexibility to recognize when you have made a mistake.

The balance between confidence and humility is best learned through extensive experience and mistakes.

The hardest thing over the years has been having the courage to go against the dominant wisdom of the time to have a view that is at variance with the present consensus and bet that view. The hard part is that the investor must measure himself not by his own perceptions of his performance, but by the objective measure of the market. The market has its own reality. In an immediate emotional sense the market is always right so if you take a variant point of view you will always be bombarded for some time by conventional wisdom as expressed by the market.

Brokerage firms don't sell customers stock so much as they sell those horrible mutual funds

Time and again, in every market cycle I have witnessed, the extremes of emotion always appear, even among experienced investors. When the world wants to buy only [bonds], you can almost close your eyes and [buy] stocks.

I was happier when pursuing success than I was when savoring its fruits; the attraction, perhaps the addiction, was in the process, as much as in its end.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the heroes were the long-term investors; today the heroes are the wise guys.