Notable Quotables

The Starbucks customer and the Teavana customer are two very different customers, two different need states that are highly complimentary.

- Howard Schultz

I was never the smartest guy in the room. From the first person I hired, I was never the smartest guy in the room. And that’s a big deal. And if you’re going to be a leader – if you’re a leader and you’re the smartest guy in the world – in the room, you’ve got real problems.

- Jack Welch

Don’t have sex man. It leads to kissing and pretty soon you have to start talking to them.

- Steve Martin

The important thing about outsourcing or global sourcing is that it becomes a very powerful tool to leverage talent, improve productivity and reduce work cycles.

- Azim Premji

Are you bored with life? Then throw yourself into some work you believe in with all your heart, live for it, die for it, and you will find happiness that you had thought could never be yours.

- Dale Carnegie

Permission marketing is marketing without interruptions.

- Seth Godin

Never Cease to Proclaim in Fearless Tones the Great Principles of Freedom

- Winston Churchill

You do things when the opportunities come along. I’ve had periods in my life when I’ve had a bundle of ideas come along, and I’ve had long dry spells. If I get an idea next week, I’ll do something. If not, I won’t do a damn thing.

- Warren Buffett

A third of the people who rush to psychiatrists for help could probably cure themselves if they could only do as Margaret Yates did: get interested in helping others. My idea? No, that is approximately what Carl Jung said. And he ought to know—if anybody does. He said: About one third of my patients are suffering from no clinically definable neurosis, but from the senselessness and emptiness of their lives.” To put it another way, they are trying to thumb a ride through life—and the parade passes them by. So they rush to a psychiatrist with their petty, senseless, useless lives. Having missed the boat, they stand on the wharf, blaming everyone except themselves and demanding that the world cater to their self-centered desires.

- Dale Carnegie

We think of Starbucks not as a coffee company but a media company.

- Howard Schultz

Doing something different is what’s truly good for society—and it’s also what allows a business to profit by monopolizing a new market. The best projects are likely to be overlooked, not trumpeted by a crowd; the best problems to work on are often the ones nobody else even tries to solve.

- Peter Thiel

There have only been about a half dozen genuinely important events in the four-billion-year saga of life on Earth: single-celled life, multicelled life, differentiation into plants and animals, movement of animals from water to land, and the advent of mammals and consciousness.

- Elon Musk

We need to, you know, restore people. We need to show mercy. I mean, because as much mercy as you show people, that’s the mercy you’re going to be receiving.

- Joel Olsteen

Success doesn’t make you and failure doesn’t break you.

- Zig Ziglar

I like sports, and I enjoy playing basketball and lifting weights.

- Joel Olsteen

I have seen firsthand that agricultural science has enormous potential to increase the yields of small farmers and lift them out of hunger and poverty.

- Bill Gates

Everything we do is about getting people to be more open, more creative, more courageous.

- Jack Dorsey

I am so disturbed by kids who spend all day playing videogames.

- Larry Ellison

Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.

- Steve Jobs

Google’s done a super good job on search. Apple’s done a great job on the iPod.

- Bill Gates

There will be no government that will be against business, so you can go ahead and invest.

- Aliko Dangote

It’s better to hang out with people better than you. Pick out associates whose behavior is better than yours and you’ll drift in that direction.

- Warren Buffett

When we bought it, Spiegel was in a difficult situation; it made a loss at that time. We invested in it and then it turned around, and then we bought Eddie Bauer and Newport News.

- Michael Otto

Your job isn’t to do your job. Your job is to decide what to do next.

- Seth Godin

Amazon.com strives to be the e-commerce destination where consumers can find and discover anything they want to buy online.

- Jeff Bezos

If you must speak ill of another, do not speak it, write it in the sand near the water’s edge.

- Napoleon Hill

Isn’t it funny how babies laugh a lot? I read a toddler, a young child laughs 300 times a day. The average adult laughs, like, four times a day. God put it in them. He put the laugh in us, but I think sometimes we let life get us down, you know, have bad breaks, and we lose our breaks.

- Joel Olsteen

The most expensive piece of real estate is the six inches between your right and left ear. It’s what you create in that area that determines your wealth. We are only really limited by our mind.

- Dr. Dolf de Roos

The most impressive person I’ve ever met? Elaine Wynn is no slouch. She’s a much better person than me. But I’ve got her. Finders keepers, losers weepers. And it’s been forty-seven years.

- Stephen Wynn

We cannot start over, but we can begin now, and make a new beginning.

- Zig Ziglar

Theories, for me, are just about freeing your mind. It doesn’t mean the theory is going to work like a scientific theory works. It’s about freeing your mind and making you think a different way.

- Steve Martin

Be happy with who God made you to be, and quit wishing you were something different.

- Joel Olsteen

I built a steel plant from the grassroots, so I learned all the nuts and bolts. When there was a problem, I would be able to guide them, though I am not a technical person.

- Lakshmi Mittal

In American math classes, we teach a lot of concepts poorly over many years. In the Asian systems they teach you very few concepts very well over a few years.

- Bill Gates

The best ideas in a company are the ones that people come up with themselves because then they really own their ideas and are committed to making them work. – David Novak CEO of YUM Brands

- David Novak

Say ‘Hello’ in tones that bespeak how pleased you are to have the person call.

- Dale Carnegie

My background educationally is physics and economics, and I grew up in sort of an engineering environment – my father is an electromechanical engineer. And so there were lots of engineery things around me.

- Elon Musk

I realized that comedians of the day were operating on jokes and punch lines. The moment you say the punch line, the audience either laughs sincerely or they laugh automatically or they don’t laugh. The thing that bothered me was that automatic laugh. I said, that’s not real laughter.

- Steve Martin

There is nothing quite so useless, as doing with great efficiency, something that should not be done at all.

- Peter Drucker

Every time I went on stage I was so terrified I almost threw up.

- Sara Blakely

If you don’t understand the details of your business you are going to fail.

- Jeff Bezos

To me there is no picture so beautiful as smiling, bright-eyed, happy children; no music so sweet as their clear and ringing laughter.

- P.T. Barnum

When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it.

- Henry Ford

With every obstacle that has happened to me in my life, my brain immediately says, ‘Where is the hidden blessing?’ In starting a business and growing a business, every day is learning how to manage obstacles.

- Sara Blakely

Wise men, when in doubt whether to speak or to keep quiet, give themselves the benefit of the doubt, and remain silent.

- Napoleon Hill

Using people to leverage a refined process multiplies production, using people as a solution to a poor process multiplies problems.

- Timothy Ferriss

You must have a vision and not just a vision but you must have a plan that would make you fulfil that vision.

- Aliko Dangote

In order to become rich, you need to learn to build systems that can work without you. .

- Robert Kiyosaki

The most valuable businesses of coming decades will be built by entrepreneurs who seek to empower people rather than try to make them obsolete.

- Peter Thiel

For more than a decade, I led an organization that put on an elaborate Christmas program each December. It was a big production, with over 250 people participating in more than 20 performances. By the end of the season, everyone who participated was exhausted.”

- John C. Maxwell

A woodpecker can tap twenty times on a thousand trees and get nowhere, but stay busy. Or he can tap twenty-thousand times on one tree and get dinner.

- Seth Godin

The basic problem with the computer in business is not that computer technicians do not understand the managers’ needs. It is that the managers do not take the time and trouble to think through their needs and to communicate them to the computer people.6 How the computer people satisfy the needs of the manager is their business. What the needs are is the manager’s business. To expect the computer people to define the information needs of the managers is abdication.

- Peter Drucker

Look at the product pipeline, look at the fantastic financial results we’ve had for the last five years. You only get that kind of performance on the innovation side, on the financial side, if you’re really listening and reacting to the best ideas of the people we have.

- Steve Ballmer

Do not let spacious plans for a new world divert your energies from saving what is left of the old.

- Winston Churchill

In order to sell a product or a service, a company must establish a relationship with the consumer. It must build trust and rapport. It must understand the customer’s needs, and it must provide a product that delivers the promised benefits.

- Jay Conrad Levinson

God can do in a split second what might otherwise take you many years.

- Joel Olsteen

A company is stronger if it is bound by love rather than by fear.

- Herb Kelleher

His genius he was quite content in one brief sentence to define; Of inspiration one percent, of perspiration, ninety nine.

- Thomas Edison

Simon received the Nobel Prize in 1978 for his contribution to organizational decision making: It is impossible to have perfect and complete information at any given time to make a decision.

- Timothy Ferriss

A successful manager told me that stopped wearing a watch. She found that the work was so immersive, anchoring it to whatever hour it happened to be was pointless. The watch reminded her of the rigors of appointments and the status quo, while her goal was to be there, right here, right now, in the moment, and to do the work in front of her. The watch had no role in doing that right, so, for now, it’s gone.

- Seth Godin

Do you ever worry’ asked Dale Carnegie, I replied: ‘No. I believe God is managing affairs and that He doesn’t need any advice from me. With God in charge, I believe that every-thing will work out for the best in the end. So what is there to worry about?’

- Henry Ford

There is so much media now with the Internet and people, and so easy and so cheap to start a newspaper or start a magazine, there’s just millions of voices and people want to be heard.

- Rupert Murdoch

Rich people have small TVs and big libraries, and poor people have small libraries and big TVs.

- Zig Ziglar

When my sister and I came along, my father’s political life was completely over. He ran for president the year I was born. So that was the end of it. He had been congressman first, then governor, before all that. So when we came along, he was running the Dayton newspaper.

- Anne Cox Chambers

Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.

- Albert Einstein

Great design = getting people to do what you want.

- Seth Godin

I see tremendous imbalance in the world. A very uneven playing field, which has gotten tilted very badly. I consider it unstable. At the same time, I don’t exactly see what is going to reverse it.

- George Soros

It is not necessary to do extraordinary things to get extraordinary results.

- Warren Buffett

Ironically, it is exactly because we are a city that embraces freedom, that welcomes everyone and encourages their dreams, that New York remains on the front lines in the war on terror.

- Michael Bloomberg

The key to a good one-on-one meeting is the understanding that it is the employee’s meeting rather than the manager’s meeting. This is the free-form meeting for all the pressing issues, brilliant ideas, and chronic frustrations that do not fit neatly into status reports, email, and other less personal and intimate mechanisms.

- Ben Horowitz

You guarantee a good meal by picking the recipes well, not by following recipes well.

- Timothy Ferriss

I usually have my yellow legal pad with me, with a list of ten or fifteen things we need to be working on as a company. My list drives the executives around here crazy, but it’s probably one of my more important contributions.

- Sam Walton

Make a point to continually search for a better way of doing things, even when things are going well, to ensure that a better alternative has not been overlooked and to keep your creative talents in practice.

- John C. Maxwell

Sometimes I look out there and I get goosebumps…

- Phil Knight

My first professional job was to sell heavy-duty waterless cookware.

- Zig Ziglar

Accept the fact that we have to treat almost anybody as a volunteer.

- Peter Drucker

It took thirty-eight years before 50 million people gained access to radios. It took television thirteen years to earn an audience that size. It took Instagram a year and a half.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

Every time I find myself stressed out, it’s because I do things primarily driven by growth.

- Timothy Ferriss

I think that maybe inside any business, there is someone slowly going crazy.

- Michael Gerber

“It’s clear there’s a lot of room for improvement, there’s no inherent ceiling we’re hitting up on.

- Sergey Brin

When Steve Jobs was at NeXT, he was really getting his head together and taking control and becoming the person that, when he came back to Apple, you know, he was ready to really run the company and keep control of things and watch what was being done and develop new products secretly that were really incredibly great.

- Steve Wozniak

Deadlines aren’t bad. They help you organize your time. They help you set priorities. They make you get going when you might not feel like it.

- Harvey Mackay

The idea of lying on a beach as my main thing just sounds like the worst. It sounds horrible to me. I would go bonkers. I would have to be on serious drugs. I’d be super-duper bored. I like high intensity.

- Elon Musk

Lady Nancy Astor: Winston, if you were my husband, I’d poison your tea. Churchill: Nancy, if I were your husband, I’d drink it.

- Winston Churchill

The common question that gets asked in business is, ‘why?’ That’s a good question, but an equally valid question is, ‘why not?’

- Jeff Bezos

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