Notable Quotables

greatness is first and foremost a matter of conscious choice and discipline.

- James C. Collins

I was trying to convince all these men to try to make a product that they didn’t even wear! Or if they did wear them, they were not admitting it! There was the problem right there. No wonder their hosiery was so uncomfortable.

- Sara Blakely

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

I do have my ducks in line if I want to do it, but I’d love to see the Republicans pick somebody that was going to win and take over this country and frankly, to use the expression, ‘Make America great again.’

- Donald Trump

The biggest adventure you can take is to live the life of your dreams.

- Oprah Winfrey

And in urology, it could be drugs or devices for bladder and prostate problems.

- David Pyott

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

Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.

- Albert Schweitzer

Men don’t care what’s on TV. They only care what else is on TV.

- Jerry Seinfeld

The only definition by which America’s best days are behind it is on a purely relative basis.

- Bill Gates

Failure is part of discovering the problem you need to be working on. If, as an entrepreneur, you are afraid to fail or to admit the failure of your efforts, then you completely lose any chance at being able to adapt and succeed at finding the problem that needs solving.

- Caterina Fake

Salvation and Christ’s love is a gift. You don’t earn it. You’ve got to receive that gift.

- Joel Olsteen

My experience has shown me that the people who are exceptionally good in business aren’t so because of what they know but because of their insatiable need to know more.

- Michael Gerber

One day President Roosevelt told me that he was asking publicly for suggestions about what the war should be called. I said at once ‘The Unnecessary War’.

- Winston Churchill

The internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow.

- Bill Gates

The nuclear approach I’m involved in is called a traveling-wave reactor, which uses waste uranium for fuel. There’s a lot of things that have to go right for that dream to come true – many decades of building demo plants, proving the economics are right. But if it does, you could have cheaper energy with no CO2 emissions.

- Bill Gates

It’s OK to have your eggs in one basket as long as you control what happens to that basket.

- Elon Musk

Develop success from failures. Discouragement and failure are two of the surest stepping stones to success.

- Dale Carnegie

Results? Why, man, I have gotten lots of results! If I find 10,000 ways something won’t work, I haven’t failed. I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is often a step forward….

- Thomas Edison

Nike is a marketing-oriented company, and the product is our most important marketing tool.

- Phil Knight

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

- Bill Gates

Hosting the Oscars is much like making love to a woman. It’s something I only get to do when Billy Crystal is out of town.

- Steve Martin

I should be only paying for things that matter. I shouldn’t be paying for things that don’t matter. And, if Walgreen wants a premium, and they’re not doing anything different, why should I pay them more?

- George Paz

Every sale has five basic obstacles: no need, no money, no hurry, no desire, no trust.

- Zig Ziglar

I believe that every single event in life happens in an opportunity to choose love over fear.

- Oprah Winfrey

Use your life to serve the world, and you will find that it also serves you.

- Oprah Winfrey

Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do.

- Steve Jobs

Not if anything to say about it I have.

- Yoda

In fact, when I look at it today, I realize that so much of what we did in the beginning was really poorly done. But we managed to sell our merchandise as low as we possibly could, and that kept us right-side-up for the first 10 years – that and consistently improving sales in these smaller markets by buildling up our relationship with the customers. The ideas was simple: when customers thought of Wal-Mart, they should think of low prices and satisfaction guaranteed.

- Sam Walton

I try to speak in everyday language. I feel like God has gifted me to take Bible principles and make them practical.

- Joel Olsteen

The first ten minutes of sorting through clothing was like choosing which child of mine should live or die.

- Timothy Ferriss

If we’re going to have any chance of sending stuff to other star systems, we need to be laser-focused on becoming a multi-planet civilisation.

- Elon Musk

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

- Joel Olsteen

It’s not enough to do good things. You have to let people know what you’re doing.

- Phil Knight

We are pleased to report the 33rd consecutive quarter of revenue and earnings growth. We are especially pleased with the balanced growth rate across almost all countries in both Europe and the Americas.

- John Chambers

Innovation comes from long-term thinking and iterative execution.

- Reid Hoffman

The clothes you wear influence you; thereby they form a part of your environment. Soiled or shabby clothes depress you and lower your self-confidence, while clean, modest and refined clothes give you a sort of inner feeling of courage that causes you to quicken your step as you walk

- Napoleon Hill

Any fool can criticise, condemn and complain – and most fools do. But it takes character and self-control to be understanding and forgiving.

- Dale Carnegie

The Cult of Done Bre Pettis wrote this manifesto on his blog: 1. There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion. 2. Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done. 3. There is no editing stage. 4. Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it. 5. Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it. 6. The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done. 7. Once you’re done you can throw it away. 8. Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done. 9. People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right. 10. Failure counts as done. So do mistakes. 11. Destruction is a variant of done. 12. If you have an idea and publish it on the Internet, that counts as a ghost of done. 13. Done is the engine of more.

- Seth Godin

Excitement is the more practical synonym for happiness, and it is precisely what you should strive to chase. It is the cure-all.

- Timothy Ferriss

If you set your goals ridiculously high and it’s a failure, you will fail above everyone else’s success.

- James Cameron

As a company gets big, the information that informs decision-making gets massive. Depending upon the prism through which you view the business, your perspective will vary. If two people are in charge, this variance will cause conflict and delay.

- Ben Horowitz

I’m not an economist and we all know economists were created to make weather forecasters look good.

- Rupert Murdoch

The quality of research in the U.S. is absolutely the best.

- Bill Gates

And the pathetic part of it is that frequently those who have the least justification for a feeling of achievement bolster up their egos by a show of tumult and conceit which is truly nauseating. As Shakespeare put it: … man, proud man, / Drest in a little brief authority, / … Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven / As make the angels weep.

- Dale Carnegie

It enriches those who receive, without impoverishing those who give. It happens in a flash and the memory of it sometimes lasts forever.

- Dale Carnegie

Steve Jobs didn’t really set the direction of my Apple I and Apple II designs but he did the more important part of turning them into a product that would change the world. I don’t deny that.

- Steve Wozniak

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

- Walt Disney

Lots of companies don’t succeed over time. What do they fundamentally do wrong? They usually miss the future. I try to focus on that: What is the future really going to be? And how do we create it? And how do we power our organization to really focus on that and really drive it at a high rate?

- Larry Page

Anyone, even a child, can be taught to develop a positive mental attitude. The method is to repeat positive affirmations such as: Day by day, in every way, through the grace of God, I am getting better and better.

- Napoleon Hill

Teaching is the only major occupation of man for which we have not yet developed tools that make an average person capable of competence and performance. In teaching we rely on the ‘naturals’, the ones who somehow know how to teach.

- Peter Drucker

The habit of doing more than paid for. One of the penalties of leadership is the necessity of willingness upon the part of the leader to do more than he requires of his followers.

- Napoleon Hill

Good habits formed at youth make all the difference.

- Aristotle

Projects undreamed of by past generations will absorb our immediate descendants, comforts, activities, amenities, pleasures will crowd upon them, but their hearts will ache and their lives will be barren, if they have not a vision above material things.

- Winston Churchill

We’ll see how that evolves. Obviously, it doesn’t mean we’ll just be willing to do anything that’s requested of us.

- Sergey Brin

It occurs to me,Jim,that you spend too much time trying to be interesting. Why don’t you invest more time being interested? Collin’s advice from John Gardner that he took to heart.

- James C. Collins

When you do more than you’re paid for, eventually you’ll be paid for more than you do.

- Zig Ziglar

In order for us to have a future that’s exciting and inspiring, it has to be one where we’re a space-bearing civilization.

- Elon Musk

I always wanted to find oil. It was always an irresistible calling.

- Harold Hamm

And well you should not. For my ally in the Force. And a powerful ally it is. Life creates it, makes it grow. It’s energy surrounds us and binds us. Luminous beings are we…(Yoda pinches Luke’s shoulder)…not this crude matter. (a sweeping gesture) You must feel the Force around you. (gesturing) Here, between you…me…the tree…the rock…everywhere! Yes, even between this land and that ship!

- Yoda

In 1973 when the Hong Kong stock market witnessed an unprecedented slump with the Hang Seng Index plunging by over 90% in a year, the Group built the New World Centre in Tsim Sha Tsui, Hong Kong through the acquisition of Holt’s Wharf. In doing so we broke the dominance of the UK-based conglomerates and, as if [being given] a shot in the arm, initiated the course of weaving the companies with Chinese capital into the economic fabric of Hong Kong.

- Cheng Yu-tung

I consider my ability to arouse enthusiasm among my people the greatest asset I possess, and the way to develop the best that is in a person is by appreciation and encouragement. There is nothing else that so kills the ambitions of a person as criticisms from superiors. I never criticize anyone. I believe in giving a person incentive to work. So I am anxious to praise but loath to find fault. If I like anything, I am hearty in my approbation and lavish in my praise.

- Charles M. Schwab

99.5 percent of the people that walk around and say they are a social media expert or guru are clowns. We are going to live through a devastating social media bubble.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

The final relationship that cannot be ignored is with disrupters: They are individuals who cause trouble for sport – inciting opposition to management for a variety of reasons, most of them petty. Usually these people have good performance – that’s their cover – and so they are endured or appeased. A company that manages people well takes disrupters head-on. First they give them very tough evaluations, naming their bad behaviour and demanding it change. Usually it won’t. Disrupters are a personality type. If that’s the case, get them out of the way of people trying to do their jobs. They’re poison.

- Jack Welch

I am convinced that nothing we do is more important than hiring and developing people. At the end of the day you bet on people, not on strategies.

- Lawrence Bossidy

The Roman world, like an aged man, wished to dwell in peace and tranquillity and to enjoy in philosophic detachment the good gifts which life has to bestow upon the more fortunate classes. But new ideas disturbed the internal conservatism, and outside the carefully guarded frontiers vast masses of hungry, savage men surged and schemed. The essence of the Roman peace was toleration of all religions and the acceptance of a universal system of government. Every generation after the middle of the second century saw an increasing weakening of the system and a gathering movement towards a uniform religion. Christianity asked again all the questions which the Roman world deemed answered for ever, and some that it had never thought of.

- Winston Churchill

If you believe in what you are doing, then let nothing hold you up in your work. Much of the best work of the world has been done against seeming impossibilities. The thing is to get the work done.

- Dale Carnegie

And here is the prime condition of success, the great secret. Concentrate your energy, thoughts and capital exclusively upon the business in which you are engaged in. Having begun in one line, resolve to fight it out on that line; to lead in it. Adopt every improvement, have the best machinery and know the most about it.

- Andrew Carnegie

Someday, man will harness the rise and fall of the tides, imprison the power of the sun, and release atomic power.

- Thomas Edison

To Admiral Cunningham it was against all tradition to abandon the Army in such a crisis. He declared, “It takes the Navy three years to build a new ship. It will take three hundred years to build a new tradition.

- Winston Churchill

As technology continues to virtualize money, brick ‘n mortar banks have become as superfluous as traditional bookstores.

- Reid Hoffman

Maintaining a consistent platform also helps improve product support – a significant problem in the software industry.

- Bill Gates

I said, ‘I’m not asking your permission, I’m just telling you, I need someone to look up to. You’re my new hero.’

- Phil Knight

Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.

- Steve Jobs

The problem we have with America is that you come over here and want to make a deal. We meet you and want to form a relationship from which we can make a deal. We meet you and want to form a relationship from which we can make many deals. Most importantly and the basis of everything is that we have a relationship where we honor and trust each other.

- Akio Morita

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

- Peter Drucker

Problems, as a rule, solve themselves or disappear if you remove yourself as an information bottleneck and empower others.

- Timothy Ferriss

The outpouring of support from millions of people in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti has been impressive.

- Bill Gates

Starting means you’re going to finish. If it doesn’t ship, you’ve failed. You haven’t poked the box if the box doesn’t realize it’s been poked. To merely start without finishing is just boasting, or stalling, or a waste of time. I have no patience at all for people who believe they are doing their best work but are hiding it from the market. If you don’t ship, you actually haven’t started anything at all. At some point, your work has to intersect with the market. At some point, you need feedback as to whether or not it worked. Otherwise, it’s merely a hobby.

- Seth Godin

I think life on Earth must be about more than just solving problems… It’s got to be something inspiring, even if it is vicarious.

- Elon Musk

Brands mature over time, like a marriage. The bond you feel with your spouse is different than when you first met each other. Excitement and discovery are replaced by comfort and depth.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

Philanthropy should be taking much bigger risks that business. If these are easy problems, business and government can come in and solve them.

- Bill Gates

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