Warren Buffett is the most successful investor of our time, perhaps of any time. He is famous for his pithy quotes, which often appear in his annual letter to shareholders.

Taken together, his quotes pretty well sum up his investment philosophy and approach. Here are his best sound bites of all time on being a sensible investor.

1. Rule No.1: Never lose money. Rule No.2: Never forget rule No.1.

2. Investing is laying out money now to get more money back in the future.

3. Never invest in a business you cannot understand.

4. I don't look to jump over 7-foot bars: I look around for 1-foot bars that I can step over.

5. I put heavy weight on certainty. It's not risky to buy securities at a fraction of what they're worth.

6. If a business does well, the stock eventually follows.

7. It's far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price.

8. Time is the friend of the wonderful company, the enemy of the mediocre.

9. For some reason people take their cues from price action rather than from values. Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.

10. In the short run, the market is a voting machine. In the long run, it's a weighing machine.

11. The most common cause of low prices is pessimism. We want to do business in such an environment, not because we like pessimism, but because we like the prices it produces. It's optimism that is the enemy of the rational buyer. 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.


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