Success Quote by Warren Buffett

Buffett is smuggling a moral argument into a sentence that sounds like arithmetic. The line flips the bargain-hunter instinct on its head: paying less isn’t automatically “smart” if what you’re buying is structurally mediocre. It’s an investor’s version of “you get what you pay for,” sharpened by decades of watching cheap stocks stay cheap for a reason.

The specific intent is to redirect attention from price to quality. “Wonderful company” is doing heavy lifting: durable competitive advantage, competent management, pricing power, a product people keep needing. “Fair price” is a quiet concession to reality - you don’t need to steal the asset; you need it to compound. Buffett’s core bet is that time, not cleverness, is the main engine of wealth. A wonderful business will keep throwing off cash and reinvesting it; a merely fair business forces you to rely on perfect timing, financial engineering, or some future buyer paying up.

The subtext is also autobiographical. Early Buffett, under Ben Graham’s influence, hunted “cigar butts” - statistically cheap, operationally tired companies with one last puff of value. The pivot to quality investing, influenced by Charlie Munger, is encoded here as a lesson learned the expensive way: a low multiple can be a trap if the underlying economics are decaying.

Culturally, it’s a rebuke to the romance of the deal. It tells investors (and anyone making long-term choices) that durability beats cleverness, and that paying for excellence isn’t indulgence - it’s risk management.