Buy stocks like you buy your groceries, not like you buy your perfume.

In the great majority of cases we simply do not know enough about the industry or company to come to sensible judgments-in that situation we pass.

When people tell me they've learned from experience, I tell them the trick is to learn from other people's experience.

Long ago, Sir Isaac Newton gave us three laws of motion, which were the work of genius. But Sir Isaac's talents didn't extend to investing: He lost a bundle in the South Sea Bubble, explaining later, 'I can calculate the movement of the stars, but not the madness of men.' If he had not been traumatized by this loss, Sir Isaac might well have gone on to discover the Fourth Law of Motion: For investors as a whole, returns decrease as motion increases.

We don't have to be smarter than the rest. We have to be more disciplined than the rest.

You could take all the gold that's ever been mined, and it would fill a cube 67 feet in each direction. For what that's worth at current gold prices, you could buy all -- not some -- all of the farmland in the United States. Plus, you could buy 10 Exxon Mobils, plus have $1 trillion of walking-around money. Or you could have a big cube of metal. Which would you take? Which is going to produce more value?

Knowing what to leave out is just as important as knowing what to focus on.