We enjoy the process far more than the proceeds.

What's nice about investing is you don't have to swing at every pitch.

The reaction of weak management to weak operations is often weak accounting.

There are all kinds of businesses that Charlie and I don't understand, but that doesn't cause us to stay up at night. It just means we go on to the next one, and that's what the individual investor should do.

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.

I won't close down a business of subnormal profitability merely to add a fraction of a point to our corporate returns. I also feel it inappropriate for even an exceptionally profitable company to fund an operation once it appears to have unending losses in prospect. Adam Smith would disagree with my first proposition and Karl Marx would disagree with my second; the middle ground is the only position that leaves me comfortable.

Earnings can be pliable as putty when a charlatan heads the company reporting them.

If you want your business to survive for 100 years, you've got to make it through every single day for 100 years. It's not enough to do it 99.9% of the time.

Would your reply possibly be this? Well, it all depends on what my tax rate will be on the gain you're saying we're going to make. If the taxes are too high, I would rather leave the money in my savings account, earning a quarter of 1 percent. Only in Grover Norquist's imagination does such a response exist.