I think that people underestimate – until they get older – they underestimate just how important habits are, and how difficult they are to change when you’re forty-five or fifty, and how important it is that you form the right ones when you’re young.
Perfection
If you expect perfection in your spouse or in your friends or in companies you’re not going to find it.
Tweeting
It personally gives me an edge when other people are not paying attention to reading and thinking, and are instead on their phones. It means that I gain knowledge from reading a few 10-K’s while others are tweeting what they had for breakfast.
Be lovable
The only way to get love is to be lovable. It’s very irritating if you have a lot of money. You’d like to think you could write a check : “I’ll buy a million dollars’ worth of love.’ But it doesn’t work that way. The more you give love away, the more you get.
Blockheads
Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.
Taxes
If anything, taxes for the lower and middle class and maybe even the upper middle class should even probably be cut further. But I think that people at the high end – people like myself – should be paying a lot more in taxes. We have it better than we’ve ever had it.
Rational people
Rational people don’t risk what they have and need for what they don’t have and don’t need.
I had a great teacher in life
I had a great teacher in life in my father. But I had another great teacher in terms of profession in terms of Ben Graham. I was lucky enough to get the right foundation very early on. And then basically I didn’t listen to anybody else. I just look in the mirror every morning and the mirror always agrees with me. And I go out and do what I believe I should be doing. And I’m not influenced by what other people think.
Learn from other guy’s mistakes
The best thing is to learn from other guy’s mistakes. Patton used to say, “It’s an honor to die for your country ; make sure the other guy gets the honor.” There are a lot of mistakes that I’ve repeated. The biggest one, the biggest category over time, is being reluctant to pay up a little for a business that I knew was really outstanding.
Preserve and enhance yourself
Imagine that you had a car and that was the only car you’d have for your entire lifetime. Of course, you’d care for it well, changing the oil more frequently than necessary, driving carefully, etc. Now, consider that you only have one mind and one body. Prepare them for life, care for them. You can enhance your mind over time. A person’s main asset is themselves, so preserve and enhance yourself.