Notable Quotables

My blogging life is basically goalless. I like the zen nature of that, and paradoxically, it improves results.

- Seth Godin

Most fears of rejection rest on the desire for approval from other people. Don’t base your self-esteem on their opinions.

- Harvey Mackay

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

- Steve Jobs

I was an executive running a pretty substantial group before becoming CEO, and I had no idea what it was like. When something goes wrong, people say, ‘It’s all your fault.’ Your reaction is, ‘It’s not my fault.’ But what do you mean? I was the founder, I hired everybody in the company, I was managing it.

- Ben Horowitz

Canon is basically a very aggressive company. Our company works on competitive principles. It does not treat people equally, but it does treat them fairly.

- Fujio Mitarai

Never fear to negotiate, but never negotiate out of fear.

- Jack Nadel

Self-disciplined begins with the mastery of your thoughts. If you don’t control what you think, you can’t control what you do. Simply, self-discipline enables you to think first and act afterward.

- Napoleon Hill

When a man has accumulated a sum of money, accumulated it within the law, the Government has no right to share in its earnings.

- John D. Rockefeller

I think many start-ups make mistakes because they are focusing on things that are farther ahead, and they haven’t done the work that has built the foundation to support it.

- Howard Schultz

All businesses need to be young forever. If your customer base ages with you, you’re Woolworth’s.

- Jeff Bezos

A person can perform only from strength. One cannot build performance on weakness, let alone on something one cannot do at all.

- Peter Drucker

Faith in the endgame helps you live through the months or years of buildup.

- James C. Collins

God will not pour fresh, creative ideas and blessing into old attitudes.

- Joel Olsteen

We will make electricity so cheap that only the rich will burn candles.

- Thomas Edison

I am going to enjoy some other things apart from business.

- Jack Ma

We can make the world a better place, one butt at a time

- Sara Blakely

The slower growth in revenues and continued pressure on margins will result in negative earnings comparison for at least the next two quarters, with fiscal 1998 earnings per share likely to be in the 2 to 2.15 range.

- Phil Knight

The first rule is not to lose. The second rule is not to forget the first rule.

- Warren Buffett

I give away something up to $500 million a year throughout the world promoting Open Society. My foundations support people in the country who care about an open society. It’s their work that I’m supporting. So it’s not me doing it.

- George Soros

As you stumble and learn, stumble and learn again, resolve to talk to yourself as if you were your best friend. So no What a #?%$@ idiot! when your BFF smashes an egg on the floor, m’kay? Be cool, like the Fonz.

- Timothy Ferriss

The two most important requirements for major success are: first, being in the right place at the right time, and second, doing something about it.

- Ray Kroc

And yet the real success goes to those who obsess. The focus that leads you through the Dip to the other side is rewarded by a marketplace in search of the best in the world.

- Seth Godin

One ought never to turn one’s back on a threatened danger and try to run away from it. If you do that, you will double the danger. But if you meet it promptly and without flinching, you will reduce the danger by half. Never run away from anything. Never!

- Winston Churchill

Historians will record 1998 as a time when the impossible happened in Asia

- Cheng Yu-tung

In motivating people, you’ve got to engage their minds and their hearts. I motivate people, I hope, by example – and perhaps by excitement, by having productive ideas to make others feel involved.

- Rupert Murdoch

Japan’s biggest problems are conservatism and cowardice.

- Tadashi Yanai

The knowledge worker is not poverty-prone. He is in danger of alienation, to use the fashionable word for boredom, frustration, and silent despair.

- Peter Drucker

In the face of challenging economic and market conditions of the past 12 months, our diversified portfolio of multiple earnings streams has served us well.

- Cheng Yu-tung

One definition of hope is happy anticipation of something good.

- Joel Olsteen

If you want to create and capture lasting value, don’t build an undifferentiated commodity business.

- Peter Thiel

Growing up I always felt like I was living on the other side of the tracks. I knew the people on the other side had more resources, more money, happier families.

- Howard Schultz

Arguing over process has become a way to endlessly defer making concrete plans for a better future.

- Peter Thiel

Our goal here in New York is to ensure that every child who graduates high school is ready to start a career or start college and to dramatically increase the number of students that graduate from college.

- Michael Bloomberg

How do leaders serve their people? They may pay good wages and treat employees with respect.

- John C. Maxwell

If you will focus on meeting other people’s needs, God will always make sure your needs are supplied. God will take care of your problems for you.

- Joel Olsteen

Give me a highly successful unionized industry.

- Jack Welch

I came to the conclusion that we should aspire to increase the scope and scale of human consciousness in order to better understand what questions to ask. Really, the only thing that makes sense is to strive for greater collective enlightenment.

- Elon Musk

Good talkers often choose to become sales professionals. Unfortunately, they don’t understand that selling well means listening well.

- Jerry Vass

The greater the obstacle, the more glory in overcoming it.

- Moliere

Dios ve el valor que usted tiene, y sabe en lo que le está convirtiendo. A veces nos miramos a nosotros mismos y pensamos: Tengo muchas imperfecciones. Tengo mal genio. Tengo un problema con mi boca. No soy tan disciplinado”. Vemos el barro, pero Dios ve la hermosa taza. La buena noticia es que usted no es un producto terminado. Dios sigue obrando, y si trabaja usted con Dios y le permite eliminar esas impurezas, Él hará más con su vida de lo que usted nunca soñó.

- Joel Olsteen

I have asked thousands of business people to smile at someone every hour of the day for a week and then come to class and talk about the results.

- Dale Carnegie

You need to live in a dome initially, but over time you could terraform Mars to look like Earth and eventually walk around outside without anything on… So it’s a fixer-upper of a planet.

- Elon Musk

An overburdened, overstretched executive is the best executive, because he or she doesn’t have the time to meddle, to deal in trivia, to bother people.

- Jack Welch

Many salespeople feel that selling is warfare: the buyer is the enemy and words are ammunition…The seller’s advances are turned aside because they are so predictable, amateurish and easily deflected.

- Jerry Vass

Anyone who prefers owning a part of your company to being paid in cash reveals a preference for the long term and a commitment to increasing your company’s value in the future. Equity can’t create perfect incentives, but it’s the best way for a founder to keep everyone in the company broadly aligned.

- Peter Thiel

It’s tangible, it’s solid, it’s beautiful. It’s artistic, from my standpoint, and I just love real estate.

- Donald Trump

Cleantech shows the result: hundreds of undifferentiated products all in the name of one overbroad goal.

- Peter Thiel

I am placed in situations with opportunities in those situations that others are not. I don’t believe that that is happenstance. I believe that there is a God that has a plan for me.

- Ronald Perelman

The hard thing isn’t setting up an organizational chart. The hard thing is getting people to communicate within the organization that you just designed.

- Ben Horowitz

I define anxiety as experiencing failure in advance…and if you have anxiety about initiating a project, then of course you will associate risk with failure.

- Seth Godin

We’re responsible for the creation of the PC industry. The whole idea of compatible machines and lots of software.. that’s something we brought to computing. And so it’s a responsibility for us to make sure that things like security don’t get in the way of that dream.

- Bill Gates

When I hear something going wrong, I insist on it being put right.

- Rupert Murdoch

At the macro level, the single word for horizontal progress is globalization—taking things that work somewhere and making them work everywhere.

- Peter Thiel

A squirrel dying in your front yard may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.

- Mark Zuckerberg

Rich dad said to Mike and me, I am so rich because I’ve made more financial mistakes than most people. Each time I made a mistake, I learned something new. In the business world, that something new is often called experience.

- Robert Kiyosaki

What a great thrill it will be for fans of all generations to see these NASCAR superheroes together again at Atlanta Motor Speedway. With 405 victories between them, each and every one played an integral role in making NASCAR the tremendous success it is today.

- Ed Clark

I’ve learned that mistakes can often be as good a teacher as success.

- Jack Welch

You read these management books that say, ‘These are the hard things about running a company.’ But those aren’t really the hard things. The hard things are when you have to layoff half your company, or you have to fire your best friend. Or you have to figure out a way not to go bankrupt.

- Ben Horowitz

All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face to face with another problem.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

You can accomplish anything in life, provided that you do not mind who gets the credit.

- Harry Truman

The top salesperson in the organization probably missed more sales than 90% of the sales people on the team, but they also made more calls than the others made.

- Zig Ziglar

The trouble with energy farming is that the energy isn’t always where you want to use it, and it isn’t always when you want to use it.

- Bill Gates

It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr. Gandhi, an Inner Temple lawyer, now become a seditious fakir of a type well known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the Viceregal Palace, while he is still organizing and conducting a defiant campaign of civil disobedience, to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor.

- Winston Churchill

When a country has the skill and self-confidence to take action against its biggest problems, it makes outsiders eager to be a part of it.

- Bill Gates

If your culture doesn’t like geeks, you are in real trouble.

- Bill Gates

The great ambition should be to excel all others engaged in the same occupation.

- P.T. Barnum

Measles will always show you if someone isn’t doing a good job on vaccinations. Kids will start dying of measles.

- Bill Gates

The fear of loss is a path to the Dark Side.

- Yoda

My mother taught me something at a young age – she said ‘you are the company you keep’. To define yourself by some label or some level of resources – that’s pretty shallow.

- Howard Schultz

I think I did pretty well, considering I started out with nothing but a bunch of blank paper.

- Steve Martin

You will never reach your destination if you stop and throw stones at every dog that barks.

- Winston Churchill

If you want to be happy, set a goal that commands your thoughts, liberates your energy, and inspires your hopes.

- Andrew Carnegie

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

I’m Phil Knight, and I don’t believe in advertising.

- Phil Knight

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

Improvement is to invent something completely new.

- Peter Thiel

Hay dos errores que podemos cometer en el camino hacia la verdad. No recorrer todo el camino, y no empezar.

- Siddhartha Gautama

I always say, ‘To have a big dream requires the same effort as having a small dream. Dream big!’

- Jorge Paulo Lemann

I believe luck is preparation meeting opportunity. If you hadn’t been prepared when the opportunity came along, you wouldn’t have been lucky

- Oprah Winfrey

How do you make your company a good place to work in general? That’s a really, really, really large and complex set of skills. A lot of it is on-the-job training, combined with excellent mentorship.

- Ben Horowitz

The fishing is best where the fewest go, and the collective insecurity of the world makes it easy for people to hit home runs while everyone else is aiming for base hits. There is just less competition for bigger goals.

- Timothy Ferriss

We believed in our idea – a family park where parents and children could have fun together.

- Walt Disney

An idea that can change the course of the company can come from anywhere.

- Jack Dorsey

You can build a successful career, regardless of your field of endeavor, by the dozens of little things you do on and off the job.

- Zig Ziglar

What has sustained us through these years? Trust. Dedication. Discipline.

- Cheng Yu-tung

The flexibility of Hong Kong businessmen should soon twist a way to success again.

- Cheng Yu-tung

The debt limits have to come down. The whole world of debt has to be changed as far as this country is concerned. We have to create jobs and we have to create them rapidly because if we don’t things are just going to head in a direction that’s going to be almost impossible to recover from.

- Donald Trump

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

- Henry Ford

I DECLARE that God has a great plan for my life. He is directing my steps. And even though I may not always understand how, I know my situation is not a surprise to God. He will work out every detail to my advantage. In His perfect timing, everything will turn out right. This is my declaration.

- Joel Olsteen

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