And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
- Anais Nin
Notable Quotables
For every sale you miss because you were too enthusiastic, you’ll miss a hundred because you weren’t enthusiastic enough.
- Zig Ziglar
The only thing that makes people and organizations great is their willingness to be not great along the way. The desire to fail on the way to reaching a bigger goal is the untold secret of success.
- Seth Godin
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
At the end of the day, the Irvine Co. is slowly being transformed. Our long-term goal is to transform what was once an agricultural company to a development company, and to that, the next, final step is to create a large real estate investment company.
- Donald Bren
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
People don’t buy for logical reasons. They buy for emotional reasons.
- Zig Ziglar
If standard of living is your major objective, quality of life almost never improves, but if quality of life is your number one objective, your standard of living almost always improves.
- Zig Ziglar
My biggest hobby is hanging out with my family and kids.
- Joel Olsteen
People say the most important thing is building a world-class team.
- Ben Horowitz
For now, if the Hong Kong environment doesn’t change, then in the long term, investing in Hong Kong is best.
- Lee Shau Kee
I’d learned enough about circuitry in high school electronics to know how to drive a TV and get it to draw – shapes of characters and things.
- Steve Wozniak
Happens to every guy sometimes this does.
- Yoda
What’s right about America is that although we have a mess of problems, we have great capacity – intellect and resources – to do some thing about them.
- Henry Ford
Forty to 60 I would say is your prime. That’s when you know the most, you’ve seen the most, you understand the most, and you still have some physical energy.
- Jerry Seinfeld
As CEO, you should have an opinion on absolutely everything. You should have an opinion on every forecast, every product plan, every presentation, and even every comment. Let people know what you think. If you like someone’s comment, give her the feedback. If you disagree, give her the feedback. Say what you think. Express yourself.
- Ben Horowitz
As a founder, your first job is to get the first things right, because you cannot build a great company on a flawed foundation.
- Peter Thiel
I have always respected education, which is why I actually went back secretly and taught school for eight years.
- Steve Wozniak
If you want to grow a giant redwood, you need to make sure the seeds are ok, nurture the sapling, and work out what might potentially stop it from growing all the way along. Anything that breaks it at any point stops that growth.
- Elon Musk
Be the one to stand out in the crowd.
- Joel Olsteen
In the most minimal sense, the future is simply the set of all moments yet to come.
- Peter Thiel
Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
Unemployment rates among Americans who never went to college are about double that of those who have a postsecondary education.
- Bill Gates
Being a good company is an end in itself.
- Ben Horowitz
So the rare individual who unselfishly tries to serve others has an enormous advantage.
- Dale Carnegie
Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishment.
- Jim Rohn
Don’t compare yourself with anyone in this world. If you do so, you are insulting yourself.
- Bill Gates
I knew that if I failed I wouldn’t regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not trying.
- Jeff Bezos
Live to learn, and you will really learn to live.
- John C. Maxwell
You shouldn’t focus on why you can’t do something, which is what most people do. You should focus on why perhaps you can, and be one of the exceptions.
- Steve Case
If you are going to kill a man, it costs nothing to be polite.
- Winston Churchill
Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of.
- Benjamin Franklin
Everyone needs a coach. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a basketball player, a tennis player, a gymnast or a bridge player.
- Bill Gates
Skills are cheap. Passion is priceless.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
I have friends in overalls whose friendship I would not swap for the favor of the kings of the world.
- Thomas Edison
I loved couriers. You had this transfer of physical information happening throughout the city and the world. Someone picking up the package, putting it in a bag, going somewhere, taking it out of the bag, giving it to someone else. I thought that was so cool. I wanted to map it, to see that flow on a big screen.
- Jack Dorsey
The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.
- Winston Churchill
For get this quite clear, every time we have to decide between Europe and the open sea, it is always the open sea we shall choose. Every time I have to decide between you [Charles de Gaulle] and Roosevelt, I shall always choose Roosevelt.
- Winston Churchill
I was the only westerner to succeed in a place that’s like a toilet, and you always come out of a toilet with a smell.
- David Reuben
Unless a man enters upon the vocation intended for him by nature, and best suited to his peculiar genius, he cannot succeed. I am glad to believe that the majority of persons do find their right vocation.
- P.T. Barnum
Like biological evolution, ‘survival of the fittest’ during the course of reformation is to adapt to changes in the surrounding environment and make changes accordingly.
- Cheng Yu-tung
Exercise is bunk. If you are healthy, you don’t need it: if you are sick you should not take it.
- Henry Ford
We can be civil. We can still be friends, and be Democrats and Republicans, and have different views.
- Joel Olsteen
If you want your life to be more rewarding, you have to change the way you think.
- Oprah Winfrey
Winners never quit and quitters never win.
- Vince Lombardi
After you become a millionaire, you can give all of your money away because what’s important is not the million dollars; what’s important is the person you have become in the process of becoming a millionaire.
- Jim Rohn
Growth is the great separator between those who succeed and those who do not. When I see a person beginning to separate themselves from the pack, it’s almost always due to personal growth.
- John C. Maxwell
The royal road to a man’s heart is to talk to him about the things he treasures most.
- Dale Carnegie
I’m born into the cycle of giving that we’re all born into, and I recognize it. So just because something is a good business, I’m not a business guy. I’m a creative guy.
- Russell Simmons
Be ‘hearty in your approbation and lavish in your praise,’ and people will cherish your words and treasure them and repeat them over a lifetime – repeat them years after you have forgotten them.
- Dale Carnegie
How much of what you know about business is shaped by mistaken reactions to past mistakes?
- Peter Thiel
Destiny is not a matter of chance. It is a matter of choice.
- Dale Carnegie
If it scares you, it might be a good thing to try.
- Seth Godin
We found that for leaders to make something great, their ambition has to be for the greatness of the work and the company, rather than for themselves.
- James C. Collins
I think every Internet user likes personalization.
- Ma Huateng
You make a living by what you get. You make a life by what you give.
- Winston Churchill
Indeed, the biggest winners in the world are those who answer yes to the question, “Am I living the life I choose?”
- Jack Welch
Reality is negotiable.
- Timothy Ferriss
Most companies that go through layoffs are never the same. They don’t recover because trust is broken. And if you’re not honest at the point where you’re breaking trust anyway, you will never recover.
- Ben Horowitz
Rockefeller succeeded because he believed in the long –term prospects of the business and never treated it as a mirage that would soon fade.
- Ron Chernow
I’m a genetic optimist.
- Jeff Bezos
No lover ever studied every whim of his mistress as I did those of President Roosevelt.
- Winston Churchill
Good advertising should give the reader essential facts about the product or company advertised and should do so engagingly without trickery or hogwash.
- Leo Burnett
If you wish to build a powerful personal network, branch out. Build a diverse network of professional contacts that includes people that don’t look like you, sound like you, speak like you or have your background, education or history. The only thing they should have in common with you and the other people in your network is that they should be really good at what they do. Create a personal network like that, and you’ll have a network that can help you succeed at anything.
- Ivan Misner
it was necessary to bait the hook to suit the fish.
- Dale Carnegie
Real integrity is doing the right thing, knowing that nobody’s going to know whether you did it or not.
- Oprah Winfrey
If you give, you will be blessed.
- Joel Olsteen
Take the first step in faith, you don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
I think frugality drives innovation, just like other constraints do. One of the only ways to get out of a tight box is to invent your way out.
- Jeff Bezos
The challenge is not just to build a company that can endure, but to build one that is worthy of enduring.
- Jim Collins
Today, we exaggerate the differences between left-liberal egalitarianism and libertarian individualism because almost everyone shares their common indefinite attitude.
- Peter Thiel
A friend is a person before whom I may think aloud.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The people’s ability to achieve is determined by their leader’s ability to empower.
- Napoleon Hill
I’ve never preached one sermon on money, on just finances. I want to stay away from it.
- Joel Olsteen
When the eagles are silent, the parrots begin to jabber.
- Winston Churchill
In the 1950s, people welcomed big plans and asked whether they would work. Today a grand plan coming from a schoolteacher would be dismissed as crankery, and a long-range vision coming from anyone more powerful would be derided as hubris. You can still visit the Bay Model in that Sausalito warehouse, but today it’s just a tourist attraction: big plans for the future have become archaic curiosities.
- Peter Thiel
If we drive down the cost of transportation in space, we can do great things.
- Elon Musk
There’s a way to do it better – find it.
- Thomas Edison
We shall not flag nor fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France and on the seas and oceans; we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air. We shall defend our island whatever the cost may be; we shall fight on beaches, landing grounds, in fields, in streets and on the hills. We shall never surrender and even if, which I do not for the moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, will carry on the struggle until in God’s good time the New World with all its power and might, sets forth to the liberation and rescue of the Old.
- 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
I’ve got the greatest job in the world. There’s no other job in government where cause and effect is so tightly coupled where you can make a difference every day in so many different ways and in so many different people’s lives. It’s a great challenge.
- Michael Bloomberg
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
I still get real nervous when I go in front of more than two people.
- Phil Knight
Humans, particularly those who build things, only listen to leading indicators of good news.
- Ben Horowitz
The best entrepreneurs I’ve ever met are all good communicators. It’s perhaps one of the very few unifying factors.
- Timothy Ferriss
Winning isn’t everything but wanting to win is.
- Zig Ziglar
Our schools are not teaching students to think. It is astonishing how many young people have difficulty in putting their brains definitely and systematically to work….
- Thomas Edison
I would like to see anyone be able to achieve their dreams, and that’s what this organization does.
- Sergey Brin
Isn’t it amazing how much stuff we get done the day before vacation?
- Zig Ziglar
If you think something hard is impossible, you’ll never even start trying to achieve it. Belief in secrets is an effective truth.
- Peter Thiel
Customers tend to avoid a restaurant that’s going aswamp in its own sludge.
- Ray Kroc
I never called my work an ‘art’. It’s part of show business, the business of building entertainment.
- Walt Disney
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
God, Family, Country.
- Zig Ziglar
Whatever you have, you must either use or lose.
- Henry Ford
Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.
- Thomas Edison
Leaders don’t rise to the pinnacle of success without developing the right set of attitudes and habits, they make every day a masterpiece.
- John C. Maxwell
[On Twitter] We believe that fundamentally we are building a utility.
- Jack Dorsey
It might interest you to know that the 1828 Noah Webster Dictionary identifies the optimist in complimentary terms, but says nothing about the pessimist. The word ‘pessimist’ was not in our vocabulary at that time. It’s a modern ‘invention’ which I believe we should ‘dis-invent.’
- Zig Ziglar
This is the sort of bloody nonsense up with which I will not put!
- Winston Churchill





