I do not believe a man can ever leave his business. He ought to think of it by day and dream of it by night.
- Henry Ford
Notable Quotables
The young athlete who aspires to greatness, generally speaking, learns a number of things from several different coaches. The first one taught him the fundamentals; the second one instilled discipline in him and taught him more of the techniques that must be mastered to excel.
- Zig Ziglar
Hold a picture of yourself long and steadily enough in your mind’s eye, and you will be drawn toward it.
- Napoleon Hill
If something is expensive to develop, and somebody’s not going to get paid, it won’t get developed. So you decide: Do you want software to be written, or not?
- Bill Gates
No tienes que responder a cada crítica. No tienes que demostrarle nada a nadie. Tan solo permanece por encima y permite que Dios pelee tus batallas por ti.
- Joel Olsteen
When you go in for a job interview, I think a good thing to ask is if they ever press charges.
- Jack Handee
Le Reve’ may be one of the three best pictures Pablo Picasso ever painted.
- Stephen Wynn
Law has become a business. Health care has become a business. Unfortunately, politics has also become a business. That really undermines society.
- George Soros
Our history is based on extending the brand to categories within the guardrails of Starbucks.
- Howard Schultz
The misconception that aid falls straight into the hands of dictators largely stems from the Cold War era.
- Bill Gates
The best way to be missed when you’re gone,Is to stand for something when you’re here.
- Seth Godin
They must be plans for learning rather than plans for implementation.
- Clayton M. Christensen
Q1 was a solid quarter for Cisco, with balanced execution across most of our geographies, market segments and product categories, … We are especially pleased with the improving business momentum in the U.S. and Asia Pacific, the strength of our product families and the accelerated growth of the commercial marketplace, which has become our fastest growing customer segment.
- John Chambers
What important truth do very few people agree with you on?” This question sounds easy because it’s straightforward. Actually, it’s very hard to answer. It’s intellectually difficult because the knowledge that everyone is taught in school is by definition agreed upon.
- Peter Thiel
People who have good relationships at home are more effective in the marketplace.
- Zig Ziglar
Nothing good ever happens after 9:00 PM.
- Andy Pearson
To find the right things, we’ll need to go to the garden.
- Timothy Ferriss
What one does easily, one does well.
- Andrew Carnegie
Understanding science and pushing the boundaries of science is what makes me immensely satisfied.
- Bill Gates
A brilliant author or businesswoman or senator or software engineer is brilliant only in tiny bursts. The rest of the time, they’re doing work that most any trained person could do.
- Seth Godin
The main cause of depression is traceable directly to the world-wide habit of trying to REAP without sowing.
- Napoleon Hill
Look after the customers and the business will take care of itself.
- Ray Kroc
What you receive is directly connected to what you believe.
- Joel Olsteen
Follow these five decision steps when hiring someone: Understand the job, consider three to five people, study candidates performance records to find their strengths, talk to the candidates’ colleagues about them, and once hired, explain the assignment to the new employee.
- Peter Drucker
God, You said Your favor is not for a season but for a lifetime.
- Joel Olsteen
I try to look on all the great things God’s done, and not focus on the negative. It’s a perspective.
- Joel Olsteen
The main rule to me is to honor God with your life. To life a life of integrity. Not be selfish. You know, help others. But that’s really the essence of the Christian faith.
- Joel Olsteen
I am looking for a lot of men who have an infinite capacity to not know what can’t be done.
- Henry Ford
Be more concerned with your character than with your reputation, for your character is what you are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are.
- Dale Carnegie
If you want to build lifelong, loyal friendships, if you want to build trust, learn to protect your family members and friends even when they make mistakes.
- Joel Olsteen
One person is never as stupid as a group of people. That’s why they have lynch mobs, not lynch individuals.
- Ben Horowitz
The internet had yet to take off, partly because its commercial use was restricted until late 1992 and partly due to the lack of user-friendly web browsers.
- Peter Thiel
Think of yourself as on the threshold of unparalleled success. A whole, clear, glorious life lies before you. Achieve! Achieve!
- Andrew Carnegie
Adversity doesn’t build character, it reveals it.
- Timothy Ferriss
You don’t have to fear defeat if you believe it may reveal powers that you didn’t know you possessed.
- Napoleon Hill
The Internet will help achieve friction free capitalism” by putting buyer and seller in direct contact and providing more information to both about each other.
- Bill Gates
Move fast and break things. Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough.
- Mark Zuckerberg
We need to and must protect privacy. But I think that people will be willing and even eager to share medical information about themselves for the greater good of mankind.
- Patrick Soon-Shiong
I never did anything worth doing by accident, nor did any of my inventions come by accident; they came by work.
- Thomas Edison
Out of clutter, find simplicity.
- Albert Einstein
Every person who wins in any undertaking must be willing to cut all sources of retreat. Only by doing so can one be sure of maintaining that state of mind known as a burning desire to win — essential to success.
- Napoleon Hill
It’s what we wrestle with every single day. The intersection of comfort, danger, and safety. The balancing act between vulnerability and shame. The opportunity (or the risk) to do art. The willingness to take responsibility for caring enough to make a difference and to have a point of view.
- Seth Godin
Man, alone, has the power to transform his thoughts into physical reality; man, alone, can dream and make his dreams come true.
- Napoleon Hill
The path of least resistence is the path of the loser.
- H.G. Wells
Derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction.
- Warren Buffett
Work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. The other four balls– family, health, friends, integrity– are made of glass. If you drop one of these, it will be irrevocably scuffed, nicked, perhaps even shattered
- Gary Keller
That’s why hiring consultants doesn’t work. Part-time employees don’t work. Even working remotely should be avoided, because misalignment can creep in whenever colleagues aren’t together full-time, in the same place, every day. If you’re deciding whether to bring someone on board, the decision is binary. Ken Kesey was right: you’re either on the bus or off the bus.
- Peter Thiel
Three classes of factors affect what an organization can and cannot do: its resources, its processes, and its values.
- Clayton M. Christensen
I want to fight poverty and ignorance and give opportunity to those people who are locked out
- Russell Simmons
[On the Nike logo] I don’t love it, but it will grow on me.
- Phil Knight
Judgment of the people in the situation is not helpful. How can you help them is the question.
- Russell Simmons
Normal is fading away. Governments and industries and schools like normal, because it’s easier, it scales and it’s profitable. But people don’t like it – we want to be who we are, not who some marketer tells us to be.
- Seth Godin
At the end of the day, I guess my feeling is that it was sort of a failure to communicate.
- Phil Knight
Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.
- Albert Einstein
You cannot push any one up a ladder unless he be willing to climb a little himself.
- Andrew Carnegie
Many salespeople feel that selling is warfare: the buyer is the enemy and words are ammunition…The seller’s advances are turned aside because they are so predictable, amateurish and easily deflected.
- Jerry Vass
There are no shortcuts to knowledge, especially knowledge gained from personal experience. Following conventional wisdom and relying on shortcuts can be worse than knowing nothing at all.
- Ben Horowitz
There is no class so pitiably wretched as that which possesses money and nothing else.
- Andrew Carnegie
Future public education will require involvement and collaboration among various local, civic, private and nonprofit entities, a concept I like to refer to as ‘community entrepreneurship.’
- Donald Bren
The important thing is not being afraid to take a chance. Remember, the greatest failure is to not try. Once you find something you love to do, be the best at doing it.
- Debbi Fields
We are not makers of history. We are made by history.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
Once we finished Christmas Rappin’ we began shopping it around town. There was interest, but no one was biting. The industry’s attitude was that Rapper’s Delight despite its U.S. sales and international appeal was an unrepeatable fluke. We identified Polygram which had a great roster of funk and R&B acts (Kool and the Gang, the Gap Band, Parliament) as the best place for Kurtis, so we made up a gang of test pressings and took them to clubs all over the city. Response in the street from DJs and club goers was great. So to hype up PolyGram we placed fake orders for the record into their system by telling retailers and wholesalers to order the 12 inch through PolyGram. PolyGram didn’t own it yet, but we created an appetite for Christmas Rappin that led them to buy it…So in the fall of 1979 Kurtis Blow signed with Mercury Records a division of Polygram Records, making him the first rapper on a major label…Christmas eve 1979 was the first time that I heard Christmas Rappin’ on the radio; I was upstairs at my family’s house. Frankie Crocker the biggest radio DJ in New York played it on WBLS.
- Russell Simmons
I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.
- Thomas Jefferson
Money without brains is always dangerous.
- Napoleon Hill
Politics is almost as exciting as war, and quite as dangerous. In war you can only be killed once, but in politics many times.
- Winston Churchill
You can take from every experience what it has to offer you. And you cannot be defeated if you just keep taking one breath followed by another.
- Oprah Winfrey
The best job goes to the person who can get it done without passing the buck or coming back with excuses.
- Napoleon Hill
I do think a founder has special permission to make sweeping changes across an organization.
- Michael Dell
One thing only I know, and that is that I know nothing.
- Dale Carnegie
The polar opposite business cliché warns that “the best product doesn’t always win.
- Peter Thiel
My favorite writers are all Jews – David, Solomon, Matthew, Mark – well, you get the picture.
- Zig Ziglar
Well, Howard Stern has been doing his impression of me for years. It doesn’t really bother me.
- Jerry Seinfeld
Time is your most precious gift because you only have a set amount of it.
- Rick Warren
The successful leader must be willing to assume responsibility for the mistakes and the shortcomings of his followers. If he tries to shift this responsibility he will not remain the leader. If one of his followers makes a mistake or proves to be incompetent, the leader must consider that it is he who failed.
- Napoleon Hill
If you ask where Nike came from, I would say it came from a kid who had that world-class shock administered at age seventeen by Bill Bowerman.
- Phil Knight
Poker is a game where you don’t have to have the best hand to win. Poker is really reading other people and reading human emotion, which certainly comes into play in business.
- Charles Ergen
The banjo is truly an American instrument, and it captures something about our past.
- Steve Martin
A man without a smiling face must not open a shop.
- Dale Carnegie
Hire sales people who are really smart problem solvers, but lack courage, hunger and competitiveness, and your company will go out of business.
- Ben Horowitz
I’ll trade glib for common sense any day.
- Stephen Wynn
Cherish each hour of this day for it can never return.
- Og Mandino
Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.
- Dale Carnegie
I’m tired of wasting letters when punctuation will do, period.
- Steve Martin
1. Doing something unimportant well does not make it important.2. Requiring a lot of time does not make a task important.
- Timothy Ferriss
If I do you a favor you will reciprocate even in greater measure if possible. Through the proper use of this law / can get you to do whatever I wish you to do. If I wish you to dislike me and to lend your influence toward damaging me, I can accomplish this result by inflicting upon you the sort of treatment that I want you to inflict upon me through retaliation.
- Napoleon Hill
The S.A.L.H. were mostly South Africans, with a high proportion of hardbitten adventurers from all quarters of the world, including a Confederate trooper from the American Civil War.
- Winston Churchill
If you’re not a risk taker, you should get the hell out of business.
- Ray Kroc
You always hear the phrase, money doesn’t buy you happiness. But I always in the back of my mind figured a lot of money will buy you a little bit of happiness. But it’s not really true. I got a new car because the old one’s lease expired.
- Sergey Brin
I think Bible principles are principles for life.
- Joel Olsteen
If you go on with this nuclear arms race, all you are going to do is make the rubble bounce.
- Winston Churchill
Statistics doesn’t work when the sample size is one.
- Peter Thiel
The problems forced us to take a hard look at what we were doing, what was going wrong, what we were good at, and where we wanted to go.
- Phil Knight
Any product that needs a manual to work is broken.
- Elon Musk
Don’t be afraid to assert yourself, have confidence in your abilities, and don’t let the bastards get you down.
- Michael Bloomberg
So at that stage you might as well keep growing, to get the advantages of scale.
- Sergey Brin
Powerful you have become, the dark side I sense in you.
- Yoda
It is not necessary to do extraordinary things to get extraordinary results.
- Warren Buffett
Don’t equate activity with efficiency. You are paying your key people to see the big picture. Don’t let them get bogged down in a lot of meaningless meetings and paper shuffling. Announce a Friday afternoon off once in a while. Cancel a Monday morning meeting or two. Tell the cast of characters you’d like them to spend the amount of time normally spent preparing for attending the meeting at their desks, simply thinking about an original idea.
- Harvey Mackay
It is theoretically possible to warp spacetime itself, so you’re not actually moving faster than the speed of light, but it’s actually space that’s moving.
- Elon Musk
Eminem’s ‘Lose Yourself’ is my go-to song to pump myself up if I’m having a tough time or if I get really nervous right before a speech.
- Sara Blakely