I made a conscious decision not to tell anyone in my life. Now I tell people–don’t tell anyone your idea until you have invested enough of yourself in it that you are not going to turn back. When a person has an idea at that conception moment, it is the most vulnerable–one negative comment could knock you off course.
- Sara Blakely
Notable Quotables
It’s always darkest before the dawn.
- Anonymous
Pain, suffering, death I feel. Something terrible has happened. Young Skywalker is in pain. Terrible pain.
- Yoda
Don’t just park money in the bank.
- Lee Shau Kee
Boadicea then turned upon Verulamium (St Albans). Here was another trading centre, to which high civic rank had been accorded. A like total slaughter and obliteration was inflicted. “No less”, according to Tacitus, “than seventy thousand citizens and allies were slain” in these three cities. “For the barbarians would have no capturing, no selling, nor any kind of traffic usual in war; they would have nothing but killing, by sword, cross, gibbet, or fire.” These grim words show us an inexpiable war like that waged between Carthage and her revolted mercenaries two centuries before. Some high modern authorities think these numbers are exaggerated; but there is no reason why London should not have contained thirty or forty thousand inhabitants, and Colchester and St Albans between them about an equal number. If the butcheries in the countryside are added the estimate of Tacitus may well stand. This is probably the most horrible episode which our Island has known. We see the crude and corrupt beginnings of a higher civilisation blotted out by the ferocious uprising of the native tribes. Still, it is the primary right of men to die and kill for the land they live in, and to punish with exceptional severity all members of their own race who have warmed their hands at the invaders’ hearth.
- Winston Churchill
Usually, what we most fear doing is what we most need to do.
- Timothy Ferriss
The three great essentials to achieve anything worthwhile are, first, hard work; second, stick-to-itiveness; third, common sense.
- Thomas Edison
A narrow mind and a fat head invariably come on the same person.
- Zig Ziglar
You can expect what you inspect.
- W. Clement Stone
A student of life considers the world a classroom.
- Harvey Mackay
Start where you stand and with what you have
- George Washington Carver
If Jesus were here today, he wouldn’t be riding around on a donkey. He’d be taking a plane, he’d be using the media.
- Joel Olsteen
The social network is the paradigm of the modern service application.
- Larry Ellison
People tend to over-weigh risks on a personal level. It’s one thing if you’ve got a mortgage to pay and kids to support, so that if you were to deviate from your job, well, how are you going to feed your family and pay the rent? That’s understandable, but let’s say you’re young and you’re just coming out of college, what are your risks? You’re not going to starve, certainly not in any kind of modern economy. It’s so easy to earn enough money just to live somewhere and eat food. Very easy to do. So I don’t know what they’re afraid of. Mostly afraid of failure, I think, but people should be less risk averse, when there’s not much at risk.
- Elon Musk
What I love about New York is just the electricity I feel right away.
- Jack Dorsey
This is not checkers; this is motherfuckin’ chess. Technology businesses tend to be extremely complex. The underlying technology moves, the competition moves, the market moves, the people move. As a result, like playing three-dimensional chess on Star Trek, there is always a move. You think you have no moves? How about taking your company public with $2 million in trailing revenue and 340 employees, with a plan to do $75 million in revenue the next year? I made that move. I made it in 2001, widely regarded as the worst time ever for a technology company to go public. I made it with six weeks of cash left. There is always a move.
- Ben Horowitz
If you tell me how you get your feeling of importance, I’ll tell you what you are.
- Dale Carnegie
I would rather entertain and hope that people learned something than educate people and hope they were entertained.
- Walt Disney
One piece of advice that always stuck in my mind is that people should be respected and trusted as people, not because of their position or title.
- Herb Kelleher
Most competitors quit long before they’ve created something that makes it to the top.
- Seth Godin
Those who do not know how to fight worry die young.
- Dale Carnegie
The accumulation of great fortunes calls for POWER and power is acquired through highly organized and intelligently directed specialized knowledge, but that knowledge does not necessarily have to be in the possession of the man who accumulates the fortune.
- Napoleon Hill
Never trust a computer you can’t throw out a window.
- Steve Wozniak
Not life, but good life, is to be chiefly valued.
- Socrates
I am proof that you can you make money in Italy and be honest.
- Leonardo Del Vecchio
Competition and capitalism are opposites.
- Peter Thiel
[On exporting sports shoes from Japan to the US]The best hope for exports lay with Onitsuka Company. So I made a cold call on them.
- Phil Knight
God made you a masterpiece – be blessed, secure, disciplined and equipped.
- Joel Olsteen
But then I noticed a deeper result: defining roles reduced conflict. Most fights inside a company happen when colleagues compete for the same responsibilities. Startups face an especially high risk of this since job roles are fluid at the early stages. Eliminating competition makes it easier for everyone to build the kinds of long-term relationships that transcend mere professionalism. More than that, internal peace is what enables a startup to survive at all. When a startup fails, we often imagine it succumbing to predatory rivals in a competitive ecosystem. But every company is also its own ecosystem, and factional strife makes it vulnerable to outside threats. Internal conflict is like an autoimmune disease: the technical cause of death may be pneumonia, but the real cause remains hidden from plain view.
- Peter Thiel
There’s never been a doctor who served many patients who, despite their best efforts, did not lose some of them to death. But they understood that was part of life itself.
- Zig Ziglar
The first thing I would do for anyone who’s trying to lose body fat, for instance, would be to remove foods from the house that he or she would consume during lapses of self-control.
- Timothy Ferriss
One of the jobs of a manager is to instill confidence, pump confidence into your people. And when you’ve got somebody who’s raring to go and you can smell it and feel it, give ’em that shot.
- Jack Welch
Nature is what we know. We do not know the gods of religions. And nature is not kind, or merciful, or loving. If God made me — the fabled God of the three qualities of which I spoke: mercy, kindness, love — He also made the fish I catch and eat. And where do His mercy, kindness, and love for that fish come in? No; nature made us — nature did it all — not the gods of the religions.
- Thomas Edison
Difference between TV and the internet was how far you sat from the screen. TV was an 8 foot activity, and you were a consumer. The internet was a 16 inch activity, and you participated. I think the sitting down thing is similar. You’re not going to buy an armoir while standing on the subway.
- Seth Godin
I have never found a ship I wanted to go down with
- Jack Nadel
Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.
- Winston Churchill
The world is changing very fast. Big will not beat small anymore. It will be the fast beating the slow.
- Rupert Murdoch
We allow no geniuses around our Studio.
- Walt Disney
Most of us have far more courage than we ever dreamed we possessed.
- Dale Carnegie
I never get the accountants in before I start up a business. It’s done on gut feeling, especially if I can see that they are taking the mickey out of the consumer.
- Richard Branson
After I met my partner, Mr. Protherow, we decided to start a banking project, and at the same time we started to think already about a business on a bigger scale. At the very beginning we thought more about gaining money, to have a normal life with our families, etc.
- Vladimir Potanin
Some of the things I see around town are just disgusting.
- Jack Taylor
An asteroid or a supervolcano could certainly destroy us, but we also face risks the dinosaurs never saw: An engineered virus, nuclear war, inadvertent creation of a micro black hole, or some as-yet-unknown technology could spell the end of us.
- Elon Musk
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
Try not to be a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.
- Albert Einstein
I believe that visualization is one of the most powerful means of achieving personal goals.
- Harvey Mackay
Look at what caused people to make a lot of money and you will see that usually it is in proportion to their production of what the society wanted.
- Ray Dalio
I’m constantly amazed that owners and managers of all businesses don’t train their people to call the person who pays by credit card by name. It definitely makes the customer feel good and will be a factor in bringing them back to your place of business.
- Zig Ziglar
The basic principle is I command, and my employees carry it out immediately.
- Wang Jianlin
Time and money spent in helping men to do more for themselves is far better than mere giving.
- Henry Ford
The future of America is not an entitlement. We have been given a treasure chest of gifts and opportunities, but some people are being left behind, and success is not sustainable unless it is shared.
- Howard Schultz
Art is the unique work of a human being, work that touches another.
- Seth Godin
Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.
- Steve Jobs
Surround yourself only with those that uplift you.
- Oprah Winfrey
I never worry about action, but only about inaction.
- Winston Churchill
Knowledge isn’t power until it is applied.
- Dale Carnegie
Communications and the exchange of value – they’re both foundational, essential things to our civilization. When you simplify those, when you get down to the essence, you fix so many things.
- Jack Dorsey
It isn’t enough to think outside the box. Thinking is passive. Get used to acting outside the box.
- Timothy Ferriss
I’m just saying that if you understand how the economic machine works, it just works like a machine. There are cause-effect relationships.
- Ray Dalio
Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.
- Winston Churchill
EVERY MOMENT IN BUSINESS happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them.
- Peter Thiel
If you can’t communicate and talk to other people and get across your ideas, you’re giving up your potential.
- Warren Buffett
Only engage in mutually beneficial relationships.
- Clay Clark
You know the funny thing, I don’t get along with rich people. I get along with the middle class and the poor people better than I get along with the rich people.
- Donald Trump
Danger: if you meet it promptly and without flinching, you will reduce the danger by half. Never run away from anything. Never!
- Winston Churchill
You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.
- Winston Churchill
Digital technology has several features that can make it much easier for teachers to pay special attention to all their students.
- Bill Gates
I also have in mind that seemingly wealthy, but most terribly impoverished class of all, who have accumulated dross, but know not how to use it, or get rid of it, and thus have forged their own golden or silver fetters. —HENRY DAVID THOREAU (1817–1862)
- Timothy Ferriss
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy and Jill a rich widow.
- Evan Esar
I’m not in competition with anybody but myself. My goal is to beat my last performance.
- Celine Dion
Don’t do the natural thing, the impulsive thing. That is usually wrong.
- Dale Carnegie
Certainly, the Windows share of servers is strong.
- Bill Gates
To succeed in business, you must build a brand and never destroy it.
- Aliko Dangote
The secret of getting ahead is getting started.
- Mark Twain
It begins by rejecting the unjust tyranny of Chance. You are not a lottery ticket.
- Peter Thiel
I know of nothing more despicable and pathetic than a man who devotes all the hours of the waking day to the making of money for money’s sake.
- John D. Rockefeller
Rockefeller never clarified why he dropped out of high school around May 1855, just 2 months shy of commencement, excercises on July 16…
- Ron Chernow
Everybody starts with creating or acquiring certain property in order to create the material to work with. When we started our business, we thought first of all about development, how to grow, and we managed to do this, even with all the difficulties and all the difficult rules that were implemented in Russia at that time.
- Vladimir Potanin
I find that I have about six bloggable ideas a day. I also find that writing twice as long a post doesn’t increase communication, it usually decreases it. And finally, I found that people get antsy if there are unread posts in their queue.
- Seth Godin
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
I think that our fundamental belief is that for us growth is a way of life and we have to grow at all times.
- Mukesh Ambani
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
With integrity, you have nothing to fear, since you have nothing to hide. With integrity, you will do the right thing, so you will have no guilt.
- Zig Ziglar
Ideas are cheap. The difficult part is finding the team to execute them.
- Raymond Kwok
For those already successful, money can become a controlling factor in life and make you a slave to it. One way to avoid that – Philanthropy.
- Lee Shau Kee
I try to build a full personality for each of our cartoon characters – to make them personalities.
- Walt Disney
We think a modern cloud lets you decide when you want to upgrade. We don’t decide for you.
- Larry Ellison
Cutting prices or putting things on sale is not sustainable business strategy. The other side of it is that you can’t cut enough costs to save your way to prosperity.
- Howard Schultz
Indecision is the seedling of fear.
- Napoleon Hill
There are four ways, and only four ways, in which we have contact with the world. We are evaluated and classified by these four contacts: what we do, how we look, what we say, and how we say it.
- Dale Carnegie
If you’re going to build a lean enterprise, you can test and measure how often the company ships iterations, how often it fails, how often it is putting things in front of people that don’t work.
- Seth Godin
Software is a great combination between artistry and engineering.
- Bill Gates
Most entrepreneurial ideas will sound crazy, stupid and uneconomic, and then they’ll turn out to be right.
- Reed Hastings
Much of what passes for quality on British television is no more than a reflection of the narrow elite which controls it and has always thought that its tastes were synonymous with quality.
- Rupert Murdoch
Be candid with everyone. Candor is the biggest dirty little secret in business?
- Jack Welch
A goal properly set is halfway reached.
- Zig Ziglar
The important thing is not being afraid to take a chance. Remember, the greatest failure is to not try. Once you find something you love to do, be the best at doing it.
- Debbi Fields
When you throw dirt at people, you’re not doing a thing but losing ground.
- Zig Ziglar
Tolstoy opens Anna Karenina by observing: “All happy families are alike”, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Business is the opposite. All happy companies are different: each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.
- Peter Thiel
Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.
- Benjamin Franklin
