The key to success is emotional stability.

My rather puritanical view is that any investment manager, whether operating as broker, investment counselor of a trust department, investment company, etc., should be willing to state unequivocally what he is going to attempt to accomplish and how he proposes to measure the extent to which he gets the job done.

The key to life is to figure out who to be the batboy for.

Accounting is the language of business.

The best education you can get is investing in yourself, and that doesn't mean college or university.

None of this means, however, that a business or stock is an intelligent purchase simply because it is unpopular; a contrarian approach is just as foolish as a follow-the-crowd strategy. What's required is thinking rather than polling. Unfortunately, Bertrand Russell's observation about life in general applies with unusual force in the financial world: "Most men would rather die than think. Many do."

When Berkshire buys common stock, we approach the transaction as if we were buying into a private business.