Notable Quotables

If you’re going to buy a real book, a paper book, there better be a good reason. Perhaps scarcity is one of those reasons.

- Seth Godin

How has being realistic” or responsible” kept you from the life you want? How has doing what you should” resulted in subpar experiences or regret for not having done something else?

- Timothy Ferriss

Frequently I’ll be interviewing with somebody or talking and in about 15 minutes they’ll interrupt me mid-stream and say, ‘Oh my God, you’re nothing like I’d thought you’d be.’

- Larry Ellison

The investor of today does not profit from yesterday’s growth.

- Warren Buffett

Most people are fast to stop you before you get started but hesitate to get in the way if you’re moving.

- Timothy Ferriss

To enjoy life, you don’t need fancy nonsense, but you do need to control your time and realize that most things just aren’t as serious as you make them out to be.

- Timothy Ferriss

When evaluating the results, we should not overlook the fact that there was, in some cases, very weak growth in Europe, Russia, and South America. There were also significant exchange rate fluctuations. In addition, the mild winter at the end of 2014 had a negative impact on the winter tire business in Europe. The driving force behind the sales development once again came from China and North America. In light of this, it is remarkable that profit after taxes of just under €2.4 billion or €11.88 per share could be achieved.

- Elmar Degenhart

Entrepreneurs must protect themselves and the venture at all times by documenting your agreements.

- Jack Nadel

Diplomacy is the art of telling people to go to hell in such a way that they ask for directions.

- Winston Churchill

So much of the downstream revenue is linked to that initial excitement, to how much revenue is produced in the domestic box office. For example, what we pay for a film three years later is highly correlated to how well it did in the box office.

- Reed Hastings

Bob Dylan has said that he who is not busy being born is busy dying.

- Peter Thiel

Family and friendships are two of the greatest facilitators of happiness.

- John C. Maxwell

Properly run startups place a great deal of emphasis on recruiting and the interview process in order to build their talent base. Too often the investment in people stops there.

- Ben Horowitz

Keep something in front of you Studies tell us that we move toward what we consistently see. You should keep something in front of you, even if it’s symbolic, to remind you of what you are believing for.

- Joel Olsteen

For whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them” (Matthew 25:29).

- Peter Thiel

To properly value a business, you also have to discount those future cash flows to their present worth, since a given amount of money today is worth more than the same amount in the future.

- Peter Thiel

All that hullabaloo about somebody’s net worth is just stupid, and it’s made my life a lot more complex and difficult.

- Sam Walton

May the Force be with you.

- Yoda

Treasure the love you receive above all. It will survive long after your good health has vanished.

- Og Mandino

Employers have decided that having the breadth of knowledge that’s associated with a four-year degree is often something they want to see in the people they give that job to.

- Bill Gates

So strong and impelling is the desire for sexual contact that men freely run the risk of life and reputation to indulge it…Fortunate indeed is the person who has discovered how to give sex emotion an outlet through some form of creative effort, for he has by that discovery lifted himself to the status of a genius…The majority of men lower themselves through misunderstanding and misuse of this great force to the status of the lower animals…Highly sexed people always have a plentiful supply of magnetism…Highly sexed people move briskly and with grace and ease…The public speaker, orator, preacher, laywer or salesman who is lacking in sex energy is a flop as far as being able to influence others is concerned…The salesman who knows how to take his mind off the subject of sex, and direct it in sales effort with as much enthusiasm and determination as he would apply to its original purpose, has acquired the art of sex transmutation, whether he knows it or not….Intemperance in sex habits is just as detrimental as intemperance in habits of drinking and eating…A sex-mad is not essentially different than a dope-mad man! Both have lost control over their their faculties of reason and will-power…When driven by his desire to please a woman based upon the motive of sex alone, a man may steal , cheat and even committ murder. But when the emotion of LOVE is mixed with the emotion of sex, that same sme man will guide his actions with more sanity, balance, and reason…The emotion of love, when mixe dwith the emotion of sex softens, modifies, and beautifies the facial expression. No character analyst is needed to tell you this, you may observe it for yourself.

- Napoleon Hill

A CEO’s job is to supervise all systems and to indentify weaknesses before the weaknesses turn into system failures. This can happen in many different ways, but it is exceptionally disconcerting when you company is growing rapidly. Your sales are increasing, your product of service is getting attention from the media, and suddenly you can’t deliver. Why? Uusually, it’s because your systems imploded from the increased demand. You didn’t have enough phone lines, or operators answering the phones. You didn’t have enough production capacity or enough hours in the week to meet the demand; or you didn’t have the money to build the product or hire additional help. Whatever the reason, you missed the opportunity to move your business to the next level of success due to failure of one of your systems…At each new level of growth, the CEO must start planning the systems needed to support the next level of growth, from phone lines to lines of credit for production needs. Systems drive both cash flow management and communication. As your systems get better, you or your employees will have to exert less and less effort. Without well-designed and successful operating systems, your business will be labor intensive. Once you have well-designed and successful operating systems, you will have a saleable business asset.

- Robert Kiyosaki

Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up working for one.

- Bill Gates

Being nice to people is just 20% of providing good customer service. The important part is designing systems that allow you to do the job right the first time. All the smiles in the world aren’t going to help you if your product or service is not what the customer wants,

- James L. Heskett

Art isn’t only a painting; it’s anything that changes someone for the better, any nonanonymous interaction that leads to a human (not simply a commercial) conclusion.

- Seth Godin

The era of cornucopian hope was relabeled as an era of crazed greed and declared to be definitely over.

- Peter Thiel

Everybody in the world is seeking happiness—and there is one sure way to find it. That is by controlling your thoughts. Happiness doesn’t depend on outward conditions. It depends on inner conditions.

- Dale Carnegie

My saddlebags are why Spanx exist! Now that I have a baby I also have a muffin top.

- Sara Blakely

The thing that motivates me is a very common form of motivation. And that is, with other folks counting on me, it’s so easy to be motivated.

- Jeff Bezos

Creativity is a highfalutin word for the work I have to do between now and Tuesday.

- Ray Kroc

Superior sales and distribution by itself can create a monopoly, even with no product differentiation.

- Peter Thiel

An extreme representative of this view is Ted Kaczynski, infamously known as the Unabomber. Kaczynski was a child prodigy who enrolled at Harvard at 16. He went on to get a PhD in math and become a professor at UC Berkeley. But you’ve only ever heard of him because of the 17-year terror campaign he waged with pipe bombs against professors, technologists, and businesspeople. In late 1995, the authorities didn’t know who or where the Unabomber was. The biggest clue was a 35,000-word manifesto that Kaczynski had written and anonymously mailed to the press. The FBI asked some prominent newspapers to publish it, hoping for a break in the case. It worked: Kaczynski’s brother recognized his writing style and turned him in. You might expect that writing style to have shown obvious signs of insanity, but the manifesto is eerily cogent. Kaczynski claimed that in order to be happy, every individual “needs to have goals whose attainment requires effort, and needs to succeed in attaining at least some of his goals.” He divided human goals into three groups: 1. Goals that can be satisfied with minimal effort; 2. Goals that can be satisfied with serious effort; and 3. Goals that cannot be satisfied, no matter how much effort one makes. This is the classic trichotomy of the easy, the hard, and the impossible. Kaczynski argued that modern people are depressed because all the world’s hard problems have already been solved. What’s left to do is either easy or impossible, and pursuing those tasks is deeply unsatisfying. What you can do, even a child can do; what you can’t do, even Einstein couldn’t have done. So Kaczynski’s idea was to destroy existing institutions, get rid of all technology, and let people start over and work on hard problems anew. Kaczynski’s methods were crazy, but his loss of faith in the technological frontier is all around us. Consider the trivial but revealing hallmarks of urban hipsterdom: faux vintage photography, the handlebar mustache, and vinyl record players all hark back to an earlier time when people were still optimistic about the future. If everything worth doing has already been done, you may as well feign an allergy to achievement and become a barista.

- Peter Thiel

No place epitomizes the American experience and the American spirit more than New York City.

- Michael Bloomberg

I never did anything worth doing by accident, nor did any of my inventions come by accident; they came by work.

- Thomas Edison

For a while… to be an evangelical meant you were a white Republican, and you were against this and against that. I don’t want to be put into that mold, because then people judge you before they even listen… I don’t want to divide the very people I am trying to reach.

- Joel Olsteen

Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.

- Warren Buffett

The skill sets it takes to be a successful entrepreneur, a successful marketer, or a relevant celebrity is a different skill set than you needed ten years ago, even though that was the skill set that mattered for decades.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

The polar opposite business cliché warns that “the best product doesn’t always win.

- Peter Thiel

[On only having 4-6 hours for sleep in guiding two companies in June 2011.] Most people have major positions at companies and they’re also raising families. They have two year olds. I have it easy.

- Jack Dorsey

I think it is possible for ordinary people to choose to be extraordinary.

- Elon Musk

If it scares you, it might be a good thing to try.

- Seth Godin

I’ve always been interested in science – one of my favourite books is James Watson’s ‘Molecular Biology of the Gene.

- Bill Gates

We modeled our employee stock ownership plan after Sam’s, and it worked well for us.

- Bernie Marcus

Mike suggested that we might want to turn our stockholders’ meetings into an event, and we went along with him.

- Sam Walton

Looking? Found someone you have, eh?

- Yoda

One of my biggest personal holdings is Rotana. That company has a very dominant force in the Middle East. It has around 45% of all the movie industry and around 75% of all the music.

- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud

Globalization replaced technology as the hope for the future. Since the ’90s migration “from bricks to clicks” didn’t work as hoped, investors went back to bricks (housing) and BRICs (globalization). The result was another bubble, this time in real estate.

- Peter Thiel

In the beginning, I thought mobile search was not much different from Web search. It’s just a smaller screen, a slower speed; it’s all the bad things. When I thought about mobile Internet, it’s all the disadvantages.

- Robin Li

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

The words Think and Thank are inscribed in many of the Cromwellian churches of England. These words ought to be inscribed in our hearts, too: Think and Thank. Think of all we have to be grateful for, and thank God for all our boons and bounties.

- Dale Carnegie

I think when I was young, let’s call it high school, and even before that, I just loved comedy, and I loved comedians. I grew up watching Laurel and Hardy. That’s really a long time ago. I loved Jerry Lewis. I just loved comedians.

- Steve Martin

Feeling sorry for yourself, and your present condition, is not only a waste of energy but the worst habit you could possibly have.

- Dale Carnegie

When access to information was limited, we needed to load student sup with facts. Now, when we have no scarcity of facts or the access to them, we need to load them up with understanding.

- Seth Godin

The way to gain a good reputation is to endeavor to be what you desire to appear.

- Socrates

I produced Run DMC. I produced some early records, lots of records early on.

- Russell Simmons

If you can’t be a pine on the top of the hill.Be a scrub in the valley-but beThe best little scrub by the side of the rill;Be a bush, if you can’t be a tree.If you can’t be a bush, be a bit of the grass.If you can’t be a muskie, then just be a bass-But the liveliest bass in the lake!We can’t all be captains, we’ve got to be crew.There’s something for all of us here.There’s big work to do and there’s lesser to doAnd the task we must do is the near.If you can’t be a highway, then just be a trail,If you can’t be the sun, be a star;It isn’t by the size that you win or you fail-Be the best of whatever you are!

- Douglas Malloch

It’s about stories. If I can tell the story to America, whether it’s Riesling or a boxer from Harlem, it will sell. I know on my gravestone it’s going to be, ‘Storyteller.’

- Gary Vaynerchuk

In poor countries, we still need better ways to measure the effectiveness of the many government workers providing health services. They are the crucial link bringing tools such as vaccines and education to the people who need them most. How well trained are they? Are they showing up to work?

- Bill Gates

You can turn painful situations around through laughter. If you can find humor in anything, even poverty, you can survive it.

- Bill Cosby

A company is a group organized to create a product or service, and it is only as good as its people and how excited they are about creating. I do want to recognize a ton of super-talented people. I just happen to be the face of the companies.

- Elon Musk

When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact.

- Warren Buffett

You have to have a dream, whether big or small. Then plan, focus, work hard and be very determined to achieve your goals.

- Henry Sy

Hmm. In the end, cowards are those who follow the dark side.

- Yoda

Any area of achievement in your life required you to stick with the basics until you became great…it’s not about learning 4,000 moves but about doing just a handful of moves 4,000 times.

- Chet Holmes

This describes Americans today. In middle school, we’re encouraged to start hoarding “extracurricular activities.” In high school, ambitious students compete even harder to appear omnicompetent. By the time a student gets to college, he’s spent a decade curating a bewilderingly diverse résumé to prepare for a completely unknowable future. Come what may, he’s ready—for nothing in particular.

- Peter Thiel

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

For a company to be valuable it must grow and endure, but many entrepreneurs focus only on short-term growth. They have an excuse: growth is easy to measure, but durability isn’t.

- Peter Thiel

Art is original. Marcel Duchamp was an artist when he pioneered Dadaism and installed a urinal in a museum. The second person to install a urinal wasn’t an artist, he was a plumber.

- Seth Godin

People have no confidence that Washington, both sides of aisle, are coming together to try and do what’s right for the economy.

- Michael Bloomberg

Over the past ten years, technological advances have dramatically lowered the financial bar for starting a new company, but the courage bar for building a great company remains as high as it has ever been.

- Ben Horowitz

Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are.

- Andrew Carnegie

Most of the exercise I get is from standing and walking all day from one laboratory table to another. I derive more benefit and entertainment from this than some of my friends and competitors get from playing games like golf.

- Thomas Edison

mean that you can’t do anything else but pray. But it does mean that you are always ready and willing to go before God with any concern or praise. Nothing is too small or too big for prayer. Prayer is simply opening your heart and connecting with God. It’s taking His promises and applying them to your life. Prayer processes the plan of God. You should bathe your life in prayer. Pray for wisdom, peace, and patience. Pray for your relationships, your job, and your children. Pray for your country and leaders. Pray with others, knowing that when two or more are gathered in His name, He is there.

- Joel Olsteen

My opinion is it’s a bridge too far to go to fully autonomous cars.

- Elon Musk

In the old world, you devoted 30% of your time to building a great service and 70% of your time to shouting about it. In the new world, that inverts.

- Jeff Bezos

I’m healthy as can be – not an ache or a pain. A lot of my prayer is thanking the Lord that I am healthy. I pray for long life and good health.

- Joel Olsteen

In this sense, if nothing about our society changes for the next 100 years, then the future is over 100 years away.

- Peter Thiel

The thing for you is a burial permit. You have only to speak and I will see that you get it.

- Dale Carnegie

My first large-scale community development opportunity was the formation of the Mission Viejo Co. – a partnership with the O’Neill Family, who owned Rancho Mission Viejo. As the young president of the company, I had the responsibility for master planning, master building and implementing the new community’s development plans.

- Donald Bren

Winners Evaluate Themselves In A Positive Manner And Look For Their Strengths As They Work To Overcome Weaknesses.

- Zig Ziglar

Really, the only thing that makes sense is to strive for greater collective enlightenment.

- Elon Musk

It is clothes. It is parts. Therefore, you combine the parts differently to create your own unique expression.

- Tadashi Yanai

What the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve.

- Napoleon Hill

If you cannot persuade people to do things, you simply will not be a success because you are not an island unto yourself. Everything in life is about persuading people to do what you want them to do.

- David Robinson

We must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive. He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love. There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

Love doesn’t sit there like a stone, it has to be made, like bread: remade all the time, made new.

- Og Mandino

Unfortunately, the highly curious student is a small percentage of the kids.

- Bill Gates

The tablet is not mainstream. Reading off the screen is not mainstream.

- Bill Gates

You think Yoda stops teaching, just because his student does not want to hear? A teacher Yoda is. Yoda teaches like drunkards drink, like killers kill.

- Yoda

Feedback

Let us know what's going on.

Get Started

Your first month is ONLY $1!

You will be redirected to your dashboard in a moment.

Fill out the information below to cancel your subscription