As youngsters, my mother taught her children that while we might not be the smartest people around, we could be courteous, polite and considerate of others.
- Zig Ziglar
Notable Quotables
To succeed in this world, you have to change all the time.
- Sam Walton
Quality means doing it right when no one is looking.
- Henry Ford
the expression one wears on one’s face is far more important than the clothes one wears on one’s back
- Dale Carnegie
Follow your instincts. That’s where true wisdom manifests itself.
- Oprah Winfrey
By my count, more business leaders have failed and derailed because of arrogance than any other character flaw.
- Harvey Mackay
A goal properly set is halfway reached.
- Zig Ziglar
Stone Age. Bronze Age. Iron Age. We define entire epics of humanity by the technology they use.
- Reed Hastings
Document in writing every agreement or important conversation with suppliers and customers.
- Jack Nadel
If you can be sure of being right only 55 percent of the time, you can go down to Wall Street and make a million dollars a day. If you can’t be sure of being right even 55 percent of the time, why should you tell other people they are wrong?
- Dale Carnegie
The thing about information is that information is more valuable when people know it. There’s an exception for business information and super timely information, but in all other cases, ideas that spread win.
- Seth Godin
Above all, you want to create something you’re proud of. This has always been my philosophy of business. I can honestly say that I have never gone into any business purely to make money. If that is the sole motive, then I believe you are better off not doing it.
- Richard Branson
I believe people have to follow their dreams – I did.
- Larry Ellison
Because, you know, resilience – if you think of it in terms of the Gold Rush, then you’d be pretty depressed right now because the last nugget of gold would be gone. But the good thing is, with innovation, there isn’t a last nugget. Every new thing creates two new questions and two new opportunities.
- Jeff Bezos
People don’t care about what someone says about you in a movie – or even what you say, right? They care about what you build. And if you can make something that makes people’s life better, then that’s something that’s really good.
- Mark Zuckerberg
Within the Nasdaq as an example, I do believe that out of the top 100 companies … half of them will not be around five years from now.
- John Chambers
Count your blessings—not your troubles!
- Dale Carnegie
How can you squander even one more day not taking advantage of the greatest shifts of our generation? How dare you settle for less when the world has made it so easy for you to be remarkable?
- Seth Godin
Said another way, the Entrepreneurial Model has less to do with what’s done in a business and more to do with how it’s done. The commodity isn’t what’s important—the way it’s delivered is. When The Entrepreneur creates the model.
- Michael Gerber
F-E-A-R has two meanings: ‘Forget Everything And Run’ or ‘Face Everything And Rise.’ The choice is yours.
- Zig Ziglar
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
In order to become rich, you need to learn to build systems that can work without you. .
- Robert Kiyosaki
One person seeking glory doesn’t accomplish very much.
- Sam Walton
When we think about online learning, it’s such ‘early days.’ Bill Gates is a wildly smart insightful guy. Yet, even a guy as smart and insightful as that, 30 years ago can say things like, ‘Who’s every going to need more than 640K of memory?’
- Reed Hastings
The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings, the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.
- Winston Churchill
It is predicated on the assumption that you dislike what you are doing during the most physically capable years of your life. This is a nonstarter—nothing can justify that sacrifice.
- Timothy Ferriss
You need to take pride in what God has given you.
- Joel Olsteen
My job is making money, helping other people make money. I am spending money, trying to make sure more people get rich, because you cannot spend a lot of money, right? So my job is spending money, helping others. This is a headache.
- Jack Ma
Brand is just a perception, and perception will match reality over time. Sometimes it will be ahead, other times it will be behind. But brand is simply a collective impression some have about a product.
- Elon Musk
Immense power is acquired by assuring yourself in your secret reveries that you were born to control affairs.
- Andrew Carnegie
Starbucks is committed to evolving and enhancing our customer experience with innovative and wholesome food offerings.
- Howard Schultz
For the first time in a very long time, I believe the external factors are slowly starting to be more positive, … This is still a minority view, held by a minority of our customers, but we’ve seen early indications that the recovery could be gaining momentum.
- John Chambers
I took a Fear of Flying class, and I always missed the class, because I was always flying.
- Sara Blakely
The reality is that I surround myself with very smart, very strong people – including my ex-wives.
- Ronald Perelman
The future of the world’s film industry is in China because we have 1.3 billion people.
- Wang Jianlin
From the Renaissance and the Enlightenment to the mid-20th century, luck was something to be mastered, dominated, and controlled; everyone agreed that you should do what you could, not focus on what you couldn’t. Ralph Waldo Emerson captured this ethos when he wrote: “Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstances.… Strong men believe in cause and effect.
- Peter Thiel
The foundation of the Germanic system was blood and kin.
- Winston Churchill
Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking.
- Steve Jobs
If your watch is slow by just four minutes, that’s not much – unless you’ve been warned that if you’re even one minute late ever again you will be fired. Then four minutes make a big difference.
- Zig Ziglar
If the recipe sucks, it doesn’t matter how good a cook you are.
- Timothy Ferriss
My interest in life comes from setting myself huge, apparently unachievable challenges and trying to rise above them.
- Richard Branson
The first Apple was just a culmination of my whole life.
- Steve Wozniak
I thought if I had a Twitter feed and say I had a following of a 100,000, that means 100,000 of them would be interested in my book. It was logical, but it didn’t turn out to be true. It turned out if I had a Twitter feed of a 100,000, four of them were interested in my book.
- Steve Martin
NO PURCHASE SHOULD EVER BE MADE IN A BUSINESS UNLESS IT IS JUSTIFIED BY AN INCREASE IN SALES.
- Robert Kiyosaki
The person who has technical knowledge plus the ability to express ideas, to assume leadership, and to arouse enthusiasm among people—that person is headed for higher earning power.
- Dale Carnegie
We are in control of the one asset that we all give the most f#%ks about, and that is time.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Employee loyalty begins with employer loyalty. Your employees should know that if they do the job they were hired to do with a reasonable amount of competence and efficiency, you will support them.
- Harvey Mackay
The best things that capture your imagination are ones you hadn’t thought of before and that aren’t talked about in the news all the time.
- Steve Wozniak
If you can’t make it good, at least make it look good.
- Bill Gates
Those convinced against their will are of the same opinion still.
- Dale Carnegie
IT’S SAID that you can only live life forward and understand it backward.
- Jack Welch
Anytime you look at anything that’s considered artistic, there’s a commercial world around it: the ballet, opera, any kind of music. It can’t exist without it.
- Steve Martin
We have the best flat land, you can grow anything in the cheapest possible way; turning Nigeria around is not really that difficult. Nigeria is really the best place to invest, it is one of the places to make money; all over the world it (Nigeria) is the best kept secret actually in terms of investment.
- Aliko Dangote
Americans who travel abroad for the first time are often shocked to discover that, despite all the progress that has been made in the last 30 years, many foreign people still speak in foreign languages.
- Dave Barry
Know when to stop.
- Jack Dorsey
There is a kind of intolerant spirit now abroad which arises out of the growing power of party and other machinery — a spirit which resents individual opinion, which clamours for uniformity and political Test Acts.
- Winston Churchill
In retirement, Smith reflected on his exceptional performance, saying simply, I never stopped trying to become qualified for the job.
- James C. Collins
The more we thought, the more they all sounded boring compared to Apple. You didn’t have to have a real specific reason for choosing a name when you were a little tiny company of two people; you choose any name you want.
- Steve Wozniak
A leader has the vision and conviction that a dream can be achieved. He inspires the power and energy to get it done.
- Ralph Lauren
Every day were saying, ‘How can we keep this customer happy?’ How can we get ahead in innovation by doing this, because if we don’t, somebody else will.
- Bill Gates
When state funding for Irvine public schools began to diminish some time ago, my Irvine Company colleagues helped me to provide private funding support for continuation of basic science, art and music programs that had been eliminated by lack of state funding.
- Donald Bren
Many people fail to make a favourable impression because they don’t listen attentively.
- Isaac F. Marcosson
Derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction.
- Warren Buffett
If you want to spend time saying this is cool, you’re going to get your ass kicked.
- Phil Knight
You have to learn to follow your heart. You can’t let other people pressure you into being something that you’re not. If you want God’s favor in your life, you must be the person He made you to be, not the person your boss wants you to be, not even the person your parents or your husband wants you to be. You can’t let outside expectations keep you from following your own heart.
- Joel Olsteen
Understand this law and you will then know, beyond room for the slightest doubt, that you are constantly punishing yourself for every wrong you commit and rewarding yourself for every act of constructive conduct in which you indulge.
- Napoleon Hill
But it’s possible the orbits of the asteroids today show some memory of having had a planet in the asteroid belt.
- John Chambers
The evolving social and digital media platforms and highly innovative and relevant payment capabilities are causing seismic changes in consumer behavior and creating equally disruptive opportunities for business.
- Howard Schultz
We should remember the warning of the wise Grail knight in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: You must choose, but choose wisely, for as the true Grail will bring you life, the false Grail will take it from you.Choose the highest-yield material and you can be an idiot and enjoy stunning success. Choose poorly and, as the Grail knight implied, you’re screwed no matter what. You’ll chase your own tail for years.
- Timothy Ferriss
Most people do not listen with the intent to understand, they listen with the intent to reply.
- Stephen R. Covey
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
If everybody is doing it one way, there’s a good chance you can find your niche by going exactly in the opposite direction.
- Sam Walton
God wants to use you in spite of your weaknesses. Of God chose to use perfect people only, He’d have no one to use.
- Joel Olsteen
I try to use my voice. I know that celebrity is valuable, and people do listen.
- Russell Simmons
You can have agency not just over your own life, but over a small and important part of the world. It begins by rejecting the unjust tyranny of Chance.
- Peter Thiel
You can’t get too much done in life if you only work on days when you feel good.
- Jerry West
Back, you know, a few generations ago, people didn’t have a way to share information and express their opinions efficiently to a lot of people. But now they do. Right now, with social networks and other tools on the Internet, all of these 500 million people have a way to say what they’re thinking and have their voice be heard.
- Mark Zuckerberg
Doing the right thing is more important than doing the thing right.
- Peter Drucker
To do what you wanna do, to leave a mark – in a way that you think is important and lasting – that’s a life well-lived.
- Laurene Powell Jobs
If your goal is to never make a mistake in your life, you shouldn’t look for secrets. The prospect of being lonely but right—dedicating your life to something that no one else believes in—is already hard. The prospect of being lonely and wrong can be unbearable.
- Peter Thiel
People who use time wisely spend it on activities that advance their overall purpose in life.
- John C. Maxwell
This is no war of chieftains or of princes, of dynasties or national ambition; it is a war of peoples and of causes. There are vast numbers, not only in this Island but in every land, who will render faithful service in this war, but whose names will never be known, whose deeds will never be recorded. This is a War of the Unknown Warriors.
- Winston Churchill
From the start, I wanted PayPal to be tightly knit instead of transactional.
- Peter Thiel
Do you remember the things you were worrying about a year ago? How did they work out? Didn’t you waste a lot of fruitless energy on account of most of them? Didn’t most of them turn out all right after all?
- Dale Carnegie
Those who try to lead the people can only do so by following the mob.
- Oscar Wilde
If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old.
- Peter Drucker
See, people are watching you. Especially your children. They’re taking in every single thing you do. They are like video cameras with legs. And they are always in the record mode. They learn more from what you do than from what you say.
- Joel Olsteen
The Internet revolution will determine which companies survive and which get left behind, … Increasingly, the Internet is recognized as the key driver in our global economy.
- John Chambers
An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.
- Niels Bohr
I would rather hire a man with enthusiasm than a man who knows everything.
- John D. Rockefeller
I wanted to be an editor or a journalist, I wasn’t really interested in being an entrepreneur, but I soon found I had to become an entrepreneur in order to keep my magazine going.
- Richard Branson
I believe that success can be measured in the number of uncomfortable conversations you’re willing to have.
- Timothy Ferriss
I like the book. Do you have a problem with that? … I just think it’s a great story of somebody who stood up for what they believe in.
- Travis Kalanick
My first company, Pure Software, was exciting and innovative in the first few years and bureaucratic and painful in the last few before it got acquired. The problem was we tried to systemize everything and set up perfect procedures.
- Reed Hastings
I recall that Harry made a trip to San Bernardino about the time we were really starting to roll, and Dick McDonald asked him what he thought the future of McDonald’s would be. Harry told him that one day this company would be bigger than F. W. Woolworth. Dick really did a double take at that. He told me later, ‘I thought you had a genuine nut on your hands, Ray.’ But Harry knew exactly where he wanted to go, and he knew how to get there.
- Ray Kroc
If we could do high-speed rail in California just half a notch above what they’ve done on the Shanghai line in China, and if we had a straight path from L.A. to San Francisco, as well as the milk run, at least that would be progress.
- Elon Musk
Through the Force, things you will see. Other places. The future…the past. Old friends long gone.
- Yoda
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
Change is not threatening.
- Stephen Wynn
Tell them to grab on to the career that engages their brain and heart and soul and gives them meaning. Tell them that eventually, the money will come, and if it doesn’t, in time, they will find themselves rich with something money can’t buy. And that, obviously, would be happiness.
- Jack Welch
