Notable Quotables

The man who does more than he is paid for will soon be paid for more than he does.

- Napoleon Hill

Every entrepreneur should plan to be the last mover in her particular market. That starts with asking yourself: what will the world look like 10 and 20 years from now, and how will my business fit in?

- Peter Thiel

Talent grips us. We are overtaken by the beauty of Michelangelo’s sculpture, riveted by Mariah Carey’s angelic voice, doubled over in laughter by the comedy of Robin Williams, and captivated by the on screen performances of Denzel Washington.

- John C. Maxwell

When we face with a steady eye the difficulties which lie before us, we may derive new confidence from remembering those we have already overcome.

- Winston Churchill

You can sing only what you are. You can paint only what you are. You must be what your experiences, your environment, and your heredity have made you. For better or for worse, you must play your own little instrument in the orchestra of life.

- Dale Carnegie

In this business, by the time you realize you’re in trouble, it’s too late to save yourself. Unless you’re running scared all the time, you’re gone.

- Bill Gates

Rockets are cool. There’s no getting around that.

- Elon Musk

I’m not a politician. I only want to help relieve the suffering in communities, and I want to help people see their community in each other.

- Russell Simmons

I believe you should have a world where you’ve got to license something at a fair price. There are good things I see on Samsung phones that I wish were in my iPhone. I wish Apple would use them and could use them, and I don’t know if Samsung would stop us.

- Steve Wozniak

I’m tired of wasting letters when punctuation will do, period.

- Steve Martin

In a start-up company where there are no processes in place to get things done, then everything that is done must be done by individual people–resources. In this circumstance, it would be risky to draft someone with no experience to do the job–because in the absence of processes that can guide people, experienced people need to lead. But in established companies where much of the guidance to employees is provided by processes, and is less dependent upon managers with detailed, hands-on experience, then it makes sense to hire or promote someone who needs to learn from experience.

- Clayton M. Christensen

Literature is one of the most interesting and significant expressions of humanity.

- P.T. Barnum

Taking complete ownership of your outcomes by holding no one but yourself responsible for them is the most powerful thing you can do to drive your success.

- Gary Keller

Any product that needs a manual to work is broken.

- Elon Musk

I would get records by Earl Scruggs… I would tune my banjo down and I’d pick out the songs note by note. Learned how to play that way. I persevered. There was a book written by Pete Seeger, who showed you some basic strumming and some basic picking… And I kind of worked out my own style of playing.

- Steve Martin

We believe that according the name ‘investors’ to institutions that trade actively is like calling someone who repeatedly engages in one-night stands a ‘romantic.’

- Warren Buffett

Before you can be sure of your ability to transmute DESIRE into its monetary equivalent, you will require SPECIALIZED KNOWLEDGE of the service, merchandise or profession which you intend to offer in return for fortune.

- Napoleon Hill

Politics are very much like war. We may even have to use poison gas at times.

- Winston Churchill

My friend didn’t understand what it means to be in the world, to be present and aware.

- Seth Godin

One of the great things about Lanai is that the weather is always fabulous. Always 82 degrees and sunny. The problem is that, like California now, Lanai needs more water.

- Larry Ellison

The challenge is to focus on the work, not on the fear that comes from doing the work.

- Seth Godin

Your brand is what people say about you when you are not in the room.

- Jeff Bezos

What we want to be is something completely new. There is no physical analog for what Amazon.com is becoming.

- Jeff Bezos

He possessed a sense of calling in both religion and business, with Christianity and capitalism forming the twin pillars of his life.

- Ron Chernow

Investing for the poor requires participation from the entire community.

- Bill Gates

We can complain because rose bushes have thorns, or rejoice because thorn bushes have roses.

- Abraham Lincoln

It’s absolutely a necessary and inevitable evolution in retailing (of Wal-Mart putting small stores out of business), as inevitable as the replacement of the buggy by the car, and the dissappearance of the buggy whip makers. The small stores (and DJs) were destined to dissappear, at least in the numbers they once existed., because the whole thing is driven by customers, who are free to choose where to shop.

- Sam Walton

You don’t even really need a place. But you feel like you’re doing something. That is what coffee is. And that is one of the geniuses of the new coffee culture.

- Jerry Seinfeld

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

Publicity is absolutely critical. A good PR story is infinitely more effective than a front page ad.

- Richard Branson

Despite incessant dissappointment, he doggedly pursued a position. Each morning, he left his boardinghouse at eight o’ clock, clothed in a dark suit with a high collar and black tie, to make his rounds of appointed firms. This grimly determined trek went on each day, six days per week for six consecutive weeks, until late in the afternoon. The streets were so hot and hard that he grew footsore from pacing them. His perseverance surely owed something to his desire to end his reliance upon his fickle father. At one point, Bill (his father) suggested that if John didn’t find work he might have to return to the country; the thought of such dependence upon his father made a cold chill run down his spine, Rockefeller later said. Because he approached his job hunt devoid of any doubt or self-pity, he could stare down discouragement. I was working every day at my business –the business of looking for work. I put in my full time at this everyday. He was a confirmed exponent of positive thinking. With almost thirty thousand inhabitants, Cleveland was a boom town that would have thrilled any young man avid for business experience. It had drawn many transplants from New England who had brought along the Puritan mores and Yankee trading culture of their old hometowns. While the streets were largely unpaved and the town lacked a sewage system, Cleveland was expanding rapidly, with immigrants pouring in from Germany and England as well as the Eastern seaboard. The plenty if the Midwest passed through the commercial crossroads of the Western Reserve: coal from Pennsylvania and West Virginia, iron ore from around Lake Superior, salt from Michigan, grain and corn from the plains states. As a port on Lake Erie and the Ohio Canal, Clevelend was a natural hub for transportation networks. When the Cleveland Colombus and Cincinatti Railroad arrived in 1951, it created excellent opportunities for transport by both water and rail, and nobody would more brilliantly exploit these options than John D. Rockefeller. For all the thriving waterfront commerce, the job prospects were momentarily bleak. No one wanted a boy, and very few showed any overwhelming anxiety to talk with me on the subject, said Rockefeller. When he exhausted his list he simply started over from the top and visited several firms two or three times. Another boy might have been crestfallen, but Rockefeller was the sort of stubborn person who only grew more determined with rejection.Then, on the morning of September 26th 1855, he walked into the offices of Hewitt & Tuttle, commission merchants and produce shippers on Mervin Street. He was interviewed by Henry B. Tuttle, the junior partner, who needed help with his books and asked him to return after lunch. Ecstatic, Rockefeller walked with restraint from the office, but when he got downstairs and rounded the corner he skipped down the street in pure joy. Even as an elderly man, he a saw the moment as endowed with high drama: All my future seemed to hinge on that day: and I often tremble when I ask myself the question: What if I had not got the job?In a fever of anxiety, Rockefeller awaited until the noonday meal was over, then returned to the office, where he was interviewed by senior partner Iasacc L. Newton. Owner of a good deal of Cleveland real estate and a mighty capitalist indeed. After scutinizing the boy’s penmanship, he clared we’ll give you a chance. They were evidently in urgent need of an assistant bookkeeper, since they told Rockefeller to hang up his coat and go straight to work without any mention of wages. In those days, it wasn’t unusual for an adolescent to serve an unpaid apprenticeship, and it was three months before John received his first humble retroactive pay. For the rest of his life he would honor September 26th as JOB DAY and celebrate it with more genuine brio than his birthday. One is tempted to say that his real life began on that day, that he was born again in business as he would be in the Erie Street Baptist Mission Church. All the latent dynamism that had been dormant during his country youth would now quicken into robust, startling life in the business world. He was finally liberated from Big Bill (his father), the endless flight from town to town, the whole crazy upside-down world of his boyhood.

- Ron Chernow

Don’t be distracted by criticism. Remember, the only taste of success some people have is when they take a bite out of you.

- Zig Ziglar

Elite students climb confidently until they reach a level of competition sufficiently intense to beat their dreams out of them. Higher education is the place where people who had big plans in high school get stuck in fierce rivalries with equally smart peers over conventional careers like management consulting and investment banking. For the privilege of being turned into conformists, students (or their families) pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in skyrocketing tuition that continues to outpace inflation. Why are we doing this to ourselves?

- Peter Thiel

I think Twitter is best when it sparks conversations elsewhere. To use YouTube and Facebook and all the tools we have available to us today to respond and also promote and answer and engage is awesome.

- Jack Dorsey

He was contradicting everything he’d taught us about not running sick and making it worse. I knew it was just to make me acknowledge that his word was law, no matter how arbitrary. But that didn’t make it any easier to take. I was so mad I ran a personal record.

- Phil Knight

Successful heretics create their own religions….You can recognize the need for faith in your idea, you can find the tribe you need to support you, and yes, you can create a new religion around your faith. Steve Jobs did it on purpose at Apple and Phil Knight is famous for doing it at Nike.

- Seth Godin

Capitalism has shortfalls. It doesn’t necessarily take care of the poor, and it underfunds innovation, so we have to offset that.

- Bill Gates

Even freebies must be delivered with a certain salesmanship or the receiver does not perceived the true value of the gift.

- Jerry Vass

I’m a pretty conservative guy. But for some reason in business, I have always been pretty driven to buck the system, to innovate, to take things beyond where we’ve been. On the one hand, in the community, I really am an establishment kind of guy; on the other hand, in the marketplace, I have always been a maverick who enjoys shaking things up and creating a little anarchy. And sometimes the establishments made me mad…

- Sam Walton

Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.

- Winston Churchill

God will never ask you for something without first depositing it within you. If you will dare to take a step of faith, you will discover gifts inside that you never before realized were there.

- Joel Olsteen

I was reading an article in the ‘New York Times;’ it talked about being in the zone, and being in the zone you’re so focused that time ceases to exist. It’s when you think, ‘Oh, I’ve been doing this for five hours and didn’t even know it.’ It’s the difference between hard work and going, ’12 o’clock, not moving.’

- Steve Martin

This is a perverse thing, personally, but I would rather be in the cycle where people are underestimating us. It gives us the latitude to go out and make big bets that excite and amaze people.

- Mark Zuckerberg

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

- Peter Thiel

You must go through the process before you get the product.

- Paul Pressey

What you study is more important than how you study. Students are subordinate to materials, much like novice cooks are subordinate to recipes. If you select the wrong material, the wrong textbook, the wrong group of words, it doesn’t matter how much (or how well) you study. It doesn’t matter how good your teacher is. One must find the highest-frequency material. Material beats method.

- Timothy Ferriss

Reaching the top is a monumental achievement, but remaining there may be the most spectacular feat of all.

- John C. Maxwell

I do not believe that people want to work hard enough and they want to find the quick Twitter, SEO. Anybody who’s obsessed with SEO has lost already, period. I believe that firmly.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

Games is probably the biggest industry today that has gone really social, right. I mean, the incumbent game companies are really being disrupted and are quickly trying to become social. And you have companies like Zynga.

- Mark Zuckerberg

Keep the right perspective Some people would love to have your problems. They would gladly trade places with you. They would love to have the job that frustrates you. They would love to sit in traffic in that car you don’t like. They would love to have your husband, who gets on your nerves. They would love to live in the house you think is too small.

- Joel Olsteen

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while.

- Steve Jobs

There’s plenty about God that I don’t understand and can’t explain. But I come back to my core belief that God is good, that He’s for us.

- Joel Olsteen

Facebook is uniquely positioned to answer questions that people have, like, what sushi restaurants have my friends gone to in New York lately and liked? These are queries you could potentially do with Facebook that you couldn’t do with anything else, we just have to do it.

- Mark Zuckerberg

Secret, shall I tell you? Grand Master of Jedi Order am I. Won this job in a raffle I did, think you? “How did you know, how did you know, Master Yoda?” Master Yoda knows these things. His job it is.

- Yoda

I should have liked to be asked to say what I knew. They always tried to ask what I did not know. When I would have willingly displayed my knowledge, they sought to expose my ignorance. This sort of treatment had only one result: I did not do well in examinations.

- Winston Churchill

One of the cornerstones of what I believe will be the future is wave after wave of applications.

- John Chambers

One of the tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon – instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today.

- Dale Carnegie

Every monopoly is unique, but they usually share some combination of the following characteristics: proprietary technology, network effects, economies of scale, and branding.

- Peter Thiel

The first time you say something, it’s heard. The second time, it’s recognized, and the third time it’s learned.

- John C. Maxwell

The basis of our partnership strategy and our partnership approach: We build the social technology. They provide the music.

- Mark Zuckerberg

In my weekly staff meeting, I inserted an agenda item titled “What Are We Not Doing?

- Ben Horowitz

The average occupancy rate of the core investment properties of the group was maintained at a high level of 96%.

- Lee Shau Kee

while you can buy your way to growth, you absolutely cannot buy your way to greatness.

- James C. Collins

This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.

- James C. Collins

We live in a day that nobody’s lived in before: where you can touch more people. The message I’ll speak tonight and the message that I speak at home, people in India will hear. It’s just an amazing day.

- Joel Olsteen

In general, the apparel industry isn’t about continual process improvement or making the perfect piece of denim; it’s about chasing trends.

- Tadashi Yanai

To say that there are no secrets left today would mean that we live in a society with no hidden injustices.

- Peter Thiel

We, we – as I say, ,we go in and shake up other industries and I think, you know, we do it differently and I think that indutjrises are not quite the same as a result of Virgin attacking the market.

- Richard Branson

The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is.

- Winston Churchill

My greatest strength as a consultant is to be ignorant and ask a few questions.

- Peter Drucker

Walking in circles Dr. Jan Souman, of the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, studied what happens to us when we have no map, no compass, no way to determine landmarks. I’m not talking about a metaphor—he researched what happens to people lost in the woods or stumbling around the Sahara, with no north star, no setting sun to guide them. It turns out we walk in circles. Try as we might to walk in a straight line, to get out of the forest or the desert, we end up back where we started. Our instincts aren’t enough. In the words of Dr. Souman, “Don’t trust your senses because even though you might think you are walking in a straight line when you’re not.” Human nature is to need a map. If you’re brave enough to draw one, people will follow.

- Seth Godin

I have no interest in gender or race or anything like that. But everyone else is kind of, with their calculating – is this the exact right mix? I think that’s – to me it’s anti-comedy. It’s more about PC-nonsense.

- Jerry Seinfeld

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

I still get real nervous when I go in front of more than two people.

- Phil Knight

Be thankful for what you have; you’ll end up having more. If you concentrate on what you don’t have, you will never, ever have enough.

- Oprah Winfrey

Sometimes you may have to trade places with someone who is hurting.

- Joel Olsteen

The Group has three areas. The first is Henderson Land the listed company. Now it has a total developable land bank of 75 million square feet of gross floor area in China. I hope that in the next two or three months that figure can rise to 150 million square feet. That would be a remarkable feet. So, Henderson is one hope. The second is Hong Kong and China Gas, which I also have high hopes for. In the mainland we already have had many projects in 12 cities there. No, actually I mean, we have projects in 55 cities in 12 provinces. Probably about 60 in total that we are working on. So that is the second area. The third area or hope is Shau Kee Finance. It’s assets have already doubled from $50 billion and I hope they can double again to $200 billion.

- Lee Shau Kee

Men of genius are admired, men of wealth are envied, men of power are feared, but only men of character are trusted.

- Zig Ziglar

People who can put themselves in the place of other people, who can understand the workings of their minds, need never worry about what the future has in store for them.

- Dale Carnegie

The financial markets generally are unpredictable. So that one has to have different scenarios… The idea that you can actually predict what’s going to happen contradicts my way of looking at the market.

- George Soros

The dark side clouds everything. Impossible to see the future is.

- Yoda

If African farmers can use improved seeds and better practices to grow more crops and get them to market, then millions of families can earn themselves a better living and a better life.

- Bill Gates

We’re all obsessed with ideas because ideas, not products, are the engine of our new economy.

- Seth Godin

In those days he was wiser than he is now, he used to frequently take my advice.

- Winston Churchill

If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.

- Bill Gates

It’s not manufacturers trying to rip anybody off or anything like that. There’s nobody getting rich writing software that I know of.

- Bill Gates

Send out a cheerful, positive greeting, and most of the time you will get back a cheerful, positive greeting. It’s also true that if you send out a negative greeting, you will, in most cases, get back a negative greeting.

- Zig Ziglar

A battery by definition is a collection of cells. So the cell is a little can of chemicals. And the challenge is taking a very high-energy cell, and a large number of them, and combining them safely into a large battery.

- Elon Musk

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