My biggest motivation? Just to keep challenging myself. I see life almost like one long University education that I never had — everyday I’m learning something new.
- Richard Branson
Notable Quotables
The challenge is this: training creative, independent, and innovative artists is new to us.
- Seth Godin
This is not checkers; this is motherfuckin’ chess. Technology businesses tend to be extremely complex. The underlying technology moves, the competition moves, the market moves, the people move. As a result, like playing three-dimensional chess on Star Trek, there is always a move. You think you have no moves? How about taking your company public with $2 million in trailing revenue and 340 employees, with a plan to do $75 million in revenue the next year? I made that move. I made it in 2001, widely regarded as the worst time ever for a technology company to go public. I made it with six weeks of cash left. There is always a move.
- Ben Horowitz
Usually, what we most fear doing is what we most need to do.
- Timothy Ferriss
Start calling yourself healed, happy, whole, blessed, and prosperous. Stop talking to God about how big your mountains are, and start talking to your mountains about how big your God is!
- Joel Olsteen
Most answers to the contrarian question are different ways of seeing the present, good answers are as close as we can come to looking into the future.
- Peter Thiel
At the macro level, the single word for horizontal progress is globalization—taking things that work somewhere and making them work everywhere.
- Peter Thiel
If we say it long enough eventually we’re going to reap a harvest. We’re going to get exactly what we’re saying.
- Joel Olsteen
So much of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to work.
- Peter Drucker
A goal properly set is halfway reached.
- Zig Ziglar
There’s always been a lot of information about your activities. Every phone number you dial, every credit-card charge you make. It’s long since passed that a typical person doesn’t leave footprints.
- Bill Gates
The first thing I ever invested in was Twitter. Blaine Cook, former CTO, was leaving the company and asked me if I wanted to buy his stock.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
I think that maybe inside any business, there is someone slowly going crazy.
- Michael Gerber
I had so many people try to talk me out of starting a rocket company, it was crazy.
- Elon Musk
I was an All-American in wrestling in high school, was National Champion in Chinese kickboxing in 1999 and have spent a lot of time around professional athletes, which includes my eight-plus years as CEO of a sports nutrition company.
- Timothy Ferriss
An optimist understands that life can be a bumpy road, but at least it is leading somewhere. They learn from mistakes and failures, and are not afraid to fail again.
- Harvey Mackay
By working faithfully eight hours a day, you may eventually get to be a boss and work twelve hours a day.
- Robert Frost
If there’s a problem, we at Wine Library never tell ourselves that once we handle this issue, we’ll never have to deal with the person again. We talk to every single person as though we’re going to wind up sitting next to that person at his or her mother’s house that night for dinner.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Your business plan is fluid, not concrete. Once you a build plan, the market place validates what works and what does not. Be flexible and evolve your business strategy.
- David Nilssen
You can live your life angry, bitter, mad at somebody or even guilty, not letting go of your own mistakes, but you won’t receive the good things God has in store.
- Joel Olsteen
The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything.
- Warren Buffett
Microsoft has had clear competitors in the past. It’s a good thing we have museums to document that.
- Bill Gates
Age doesn’t matter: an open mind does.
- Timothy Ferriss
We are masters of the unsaid words, but slaves of those we let slip out.
- Winston Churchill
I am excited for the opportunity to pursue new interests, including my work with a few public company boards, several universities in the U.S. and the UK and ophthalmic charities whose goals are to improve eye health in emerging markets.
- David Pyott
I’ve always believed that businesses should be good citizens…
- Phil Knight
Battles are won by slaughter and maneuver. The greater the general, the more he contributes in maneuver, the less he demands in slaughter.
- Winston Churchill
We’re getting hurt, but I’m a long-term investor.
- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud
Think and Thank. Think of all we have to be grateful for, and thank God for all our boons and bounties.
- Dale Carnegie
One thing only I know, and that is that I know nothing.
- Dale Carnegie
In order to build a great technology company, you have to hire lots of incredibly smart people. It’s a total waste to have lots of big brains but not let them work on your biggest problems. A brain, no matter how big, cannot solve a problem it doesn’t know about.
- Ben Horowitz
I do feel, in a sense, the rules of engagement for citizenship has changed, and we must encourage other people to speak up and to take action.
- Howard Schultz
I don’t get caught up in the moment.
- Ray Dalio
The only definition by which America’s best days are behind it is on a purely relative basis.
- Bill Gates
Energy is the essence of life. Every day you decide how you’re going to use it by knowing what you want and what it takes to reach that goal, and by maintaining focus.
- Oprah Winfrey
A startup messed up at its foundation cannot be fixed.
- Peter Thiel
Throughout this quarter of a century, the entrepreneurial outlook, versatility and vision of our employees have remained the crucial elements of our success…
- Cheng Yu-tung
Churchill: The strangling of Bolshevism at its birth would have been an untold blessing to the human race.Mr. Seymour Cocks (Labor Party): “If that had happened we should have lost the 1939 -45 war”.Churchill: No, it would have prevented that war.
- Winston Churchill
I seek constantly to improve my manners and graces, for they are the sugar to which all are attracted.
- Og Mandino
The balloons only have one life and the only way of finding out whether they work is to attempt to fly around the world.
- Richard Branson
Don’t waste your energy trying to convince people to understand you. Your time is too valuable to try to prove yourself to people.
- Joel Olsteen
I don’t know what would have happened to Wal-Mart if we had laid low and never stirred up the competition. My guess is that we would have remained a strictly regional operator.
- Sam Walton
As a businessperson, I don’t have the power to change the government. That is in the hands of the political leaders. However, as a taxpayer, we have the right to be critical of the government and demand change.
- Tadashi Yanai
Poke the box How do computer programmers learn their art? Is there a step-by-step process that guarantees you’ll get good? All great programmers learn the same way. They poke the box. They code something and see what the computer does. They change it and see what the computer does. They repeat the process again and again until they figure out how the box works. The box might be a computer or it might be a market or it might be a customer or it might be your boss. It’s a puzzle, one that can be solved in only one way—by poking.
- Seth Godin
Whenever a high-profile leader dies, people immediately attempt to summarize that person’s life in a sentence. Often, critics and commentators get caught up looking at the leader’s style, or which political or philosophical camp they represented.
- John C. Maxwell
We have most of the software industry running Autonomy.
- Larry Ellison
Nobody is actually a natural C.E.O.
- Ben Horowitz
A great man shows his greatness by the way he treats little men.
- Thomas Carlyle
One might think that the money value of an invention constitutes its reward to the man who loves his work. But… I continue to find my greatest pleasure, and so my reward, in the work that precedes what the world calls success.
- Thomas Edison
Just because you don’t announce your plan doesn’t mean you don’t have one.
- Herb Kelleher
Learning to be a CEO through classroom training would be like learning to be an NFL quarterback through classroom training.
- Ben Horowitz
Being a stand-up is my mission in life; it’s my passion. My ongoing goal is to simply be funny, on my own, in front of a roomful of strangers.
- Jerry Seinfeld
If you will live like no one else, later you can live like no one else.
- Dave Ramsey
We will intensify our efforts to build out our infrastructure overseas and to develop products that are tailored to individual markets
- Sergey Brin
What we discovered, counter-intuitively, is that when you start killing a cancer cell, one of the things it does in order to survive is to spread even further. It causes itself to form new blood vessels. We’ve termed this ‘reactionary angiogenesis.’
- Patrick Soon-Shiong
In my early teens, I knew I wanted to do television production. I loved cameras, editing and producing, anything that had to do with television production. My friend had a production studio across town, and we’d go over there at night and shoot and edit. I produced my father’s televised service for 17 years.
- Joel Olsteen
You have to understand your own personal DNA. Don’t do things because I do them or Steve Jobs or Mark Cuban tried it. You need to know your personal brand and stay true to it.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
No lover ever studied every whim of his mistress as I did those of President Roosevelt.
- Winston Churchill
I am never going to have anything more to do with politics or politicians. When this war is over I shall confine myself entirely to writing and painting.
- Winston Churchill
To grasp and hold a vision, that is the very essence of successful leadership—not only on the movie set where I learned it, but everywhere.
- Ronald Reagan
What General Weygand called the Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.
- Winston Churchill
One of the greatest failures to execute is the lack of follow-up. This seems so obvious, yet very few companies place as much emphasis on accountability as they do on figuring what they want to get done. Steve Reinemund, who was president of Pizza Hut when I was head of marketing there, is the best I’ve ever seen on this front. He always carried a three-by-five note card in his shirt pocket. When saw something that needed to be done, he’d pull out the card and write it down. Like everyone else who witnessed this, I quickly realized that I had better write down the same things because he’d surely be on me until they got done. Steve got results everywhere he went, whether it was as president of Pizzas Hut or Frito-Lay or chairman of PepsiCo, because he made a point of following up. People often lose track of what they’ve talked about in meetings of what they promised to do, but when you write it down, you won’t forget it.
- David Novak
Not life, but good life, is to be chiefly valued.
- Socrates
I’m an investor in a number of biotech companies, partly because of my incredible enthusiasm for the great innovations they will bring.
- Bill Gates
I just believe that the way that young people’s minds develop is fascinating. If you are doing something for a grade or salary or a reward, it doesn’t have as much meaning as creating something for yourself and your own life.
- Steve Wozniak
Whatever the mind of man creates, should be controlled by man’s character.
- Thomas Edison
Transferring your passion to your job is far easier than finding a job that happens to match your passion.
- Seth Godin
Great companies have secrets: specific reasons for success that other people don’t see.
- Peter Thiel
you don’t need to understand any of the biology, just as you don’t need to understand radiation to use a microwave oven.
- Timothy Ferriss
People still think of me as a cartoonist, but the only thing I lift a pen or pencil for these days is to sign a contract, a check, or an autograph.
- Walt Disney
This could easily end up one of the driest winters ever, unless things switch around.
- Ed Clark
In the 1960s, if you introduced a new product to America, 90% of the people who viewed it for the first time believed in the corporate promise. Then 40 years later if you performed the same exercise, less than 10% of the public believed it was true. The fracturing of trust is based on the fact that the consumer has been let down.
- Howard Schultz
10,000 years of fitful advance from primitive agriculture to medieval windmills and 16th-century astrolabes, the modern world suddenly experienced relentless technological progress from the advent of the steam engine in the 1760s all the way up to about 1970.
- Peter Thiel
I’m trying to make God more relevant in our society. And I think talking in everyday terms and making sure people can understand it – I think that’s important.
- Joel Olsteen
The way of the warrior: keep death in mind at all times. If a warrior keeps death in mind at all times and lives as though each day might be his last, he will conduct himself properly in all his actions.
- Principle of the Bushido
Many people are unhappy and are not experiencing life to its fullest because they’ve closed their hearts to compassion, they are motivated by only what they want and what they think they need. They rarely do anything for anybody else unless they have an ulterior goal in mind. They are self-involved and self-centered.
- Joel Olsteen
As long as a person doesn’t know what he doesn’t know, he doesn’t grow.
- John Maxwell
We can say with certainty – or 90% probability – that the new industries that are about to be born will have nothing to do with information.
- Peter Drucker
Being financially rich and having the ability to live like a millionaire are fundamentally two very different things.
- Timothy Ferriss
China and the U.S. need each other very badly. Yes, we should argue about some things, but it’s not an ‘us versus them,’ it’s an ‘us and them’ type scenario.
- Bill Gates
People do not wander around and then find themselves at the top of Mount Everest.
- Zig Ziglar
When an employee asks why the company does things a certain way, and you can explain the logical reason, then the employee knows what she’s doing is valid.
- Harvey Mackay
There is a certain amount of dissatisfaction that goes with knowing your time, talent and abilities are not being properly used.
- Zig Ziglar
The pessimist complains about the wind. The optimist expects it to change. The leader adjusts the sails.
- John C. Maxwell
A decision is a judgment. It is a choice between alternatives. It is rarely a choice between right and wrong. It is at best a choice between “almost right” and “probably wrong”—but much more often a choice between two courses of action neither of which is provably more nearly right than the other.
- Peter Drucker
We can be certain that cities around the world will compete for the jobs that the next revival of the financial services industry will bring.
- Michael Bloomberg
If the terrorists have the sympathy of people, it’s much harder to find them. So we need people on our side, and that leads us to be responsible leaders of the world, show some concern with the problems.
- George Soros
I have always been interested in this man. My father had a set of Tom Paine’s books on the shelf at home. I must have opened the covers about the time I was 13. And I can still remember the flash of enlightenment which shone from his pages. It was a revelation, indeed, to encounter his views on political and religious matters, so different from the views of many people around us. Of course I did not understand him very well, but his sincerity and ardor made an impression upon me that nothing has ever served to lessen.I have heard it said that Paine borrowed from Montesquieu and Rousseau. Maybe he had read them both and learned something from each. I do not know. But I doubt that Paine ever borrowed a line from any man…Many a person who could not comprehend Rousseau, and would be puzzled by Montesquieu, could understand Paine as an open book. He wrote with a clarity, a sharpness of outline and exactness of speech that even a schoolboy should be able to grasp. There is nothing false, little that is subtle, and an impressive lack of the negative in Paine. He literally cried to his reader for a comprehending hour, and then filled that hour with such sagacious reasoning as we find surpassed nowhere else in American letters – seldom in any school of writing.Paine would have been the last to look upon himself as a man of letters. Liberty was the dear companion of his heart; truth in all things his object….we, perhaps, remember him best for his declaration:’The world is my country; to do good my religion.’Again we see the spontaneous genius at work in ‘The Rights of Man’, and that genius busy at his favorite task – liberty. Written hurriedly and in the heat of controversy, ‘The Rights of Man’ yet compares favorably with classical models, and in some places rises to vaulting heights. Its appearance outmatched events attending Burke’s effort in his ‘Reflections’.Instantly the English public caught hold of this new contribution. It was more than a defense of liberty; it was a world declaration of what Paine had declared before in the Colonies. His reasoning was so cogent, his command of the subject so broad, that his legion of enemies found it hard to answer him.’Tom Paine is quite right,’ said Pitt, the Prime Minister, ‘but if I were to encourage his views we should have a bloody revolution.’Here we see the progressive quality of Paine’s genius at its best. ‘The Rights of Man’ amplified and reasserted what already had been said in ‘Common Sense’, with now a greater force and the power of a maturing mind. Just when Paine was at the height of his renown, an indictment for treason confronted him. About the same time he was elected a member of the Revolutionary Assembly and escaped to France.So little did he know of the French tongue that addresses to his constituents had to be translated by an interpreter. But he sat in the assembly. Shrinking from the guillotine, he encountered Robespierre’s enmity, and presently found himself in prison, facing that dread instrument.But his imprisonment was fertile. Already he had written the first part of ‘The Age of Reason’ and now turned his time to the latter part.Presently his second escape cheated Robespierre of vengeance, and in the course of events ‘The Age of Reason’ appeared. Instantly it became a source of contention which still endures. Paine returned to the United States a little broken, and went to live at his home in New Rochelle – a public gift. Many of his old companions in the struggle for liberty avoided him, and he was publicly condemned by the unthinking.
- Thomas Edison
Know what your people are like, and make sure they do their jobs excellently.
- Ray Dalio
In periods where there is no leadership, society stands still. Progress occurs when courageous, skillful leaders seize the opportunity to change things for the better.
- Harry Truman
Many people who I respected were disappointed when I started ‘Wine Library TV.’ They thought I was dumbing down wine, but I always knew I was one of the biggest producers of new wine drinkers in the world, and people are realizing it now.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
The Law of the Garbage Truck,” was this: Many people are like garbage trucks. They run around full of garbage, full of frustration, full of anger, and full of disappointment. As their garbage piles up, they look for a place to dump it. And if you let them, they’ll dump it on you. So when someone wants to dump on you, don’t take it personally. It doesn’t have anything to do with you. Just smile, wave, wish them well, and move on. Believe me, you’ll be happier.
- Joel Olsteen
Long-term planning is often undervalued by our indefinite short-term world.
- Peter Thiel
I am not interested in power for power’s sake, but I’m interested in power that is moral, that is right and that is good.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
SpaceX is only 12 years old now. Between now and 2040, the company’s lifespan will have tripled. If we have linear improvement in technology, as opposed to logarithmic, then we should have a significant base on Mars, perhaps with thousands or tens of thousands of people.
- Elon Musk
Every job you take is a gamble that could increase your options or shut them down.
- Jack Welch
We’ve shown the world that New York can never be defeated, because of its dynamic and diverse population and because it embodies the spirit of enterprise and the love of liberty. And because no matter who you are, if you believe in yourself and your dream, New York will always be the place for you.
- Michael Bloomberg
I had a feeling once about Mathematics – that I saw it all. Depth beyond depth was revealed to me – the Byss and Abyss. I saw – as one might see the transit of Venus or even the Lord Mayor’s Show – a quantity passing through infinity and changing its sign from plus to minus. I saw exactly why it happened and why the tergiversation was inevitable but it was after dinner and I let it go.
- Winston Churchill
There is only one excuse for a speaker’s asking the attention of his audience: he must have either truth or entertainment for them.
- Dale Carnegie
Be candid with everyone.
- Jack Welch
