The overwhelming majority of people are comfortable with consensus, but successful investors tend to have a contrarian bent.

It turns out that value investing is something that is in your blood. There are people who just don't have the patience and discipline to do it, and there are people who do. So it leads me to think it's genetic.

Investors need to pick their poison: Either make more money when times are good and have a really ugly year every so often, or protect on the downside and don't be at the party so long when things are good.

Over the long run, the crowd is always wrong.

One of the biggest challenges in investing is that the opportunity set available today is not the complete opportunity set that should be considered. Limiting your opportunity set to the one immediately at hand would be like limiting your spouse to the students you met in high school

Almost no one will accept responsibility for his or her role in precipitating a crisis: not leveraged speculators, not willfully blind leaders of financial institutions, and certainly not regulators, government officials, ratings agencies or politicians.

Always look for forced urgent selling.