Notable Quotables

I updated my grilling app, iGrill, today and it now has Facebook integration that lets you see what other people are grilling right now around the world. Awesome.

- Mark Zuckerberg

If you can’t be remarkable, perhaps you should consider doing nothing until you can.

- Seth Godin

God doesn’t look at how much we do, but with how much love we do it.

- Mother Teresa

A CEO’s job is to supervise all systems and to indentify weaknesses before the weaknesses turn into system failures. This can happen in many different ways, but it is exceptionally disconcerting when you company is growing rapidly. Your sales are increasing, your product of service is getting attention from the media, and suddenly you can’t deliver. Why? Uusually, it’s because your systems imploded from the increased demand. You didn’t have enough phone lines, or operators answering the phones. You didn’t have enough production capacity or enough hours in the week to meet the demand; or you didn’t have the money to build the product or hire additional help. Whatever the reason, you missed the opportunity to move your business to the next level of success due to failure of one of your systems…At each new level of growth, the CEO must start planning the systems needed to support the next level of growth, from phone lines to lines of credit for production needs. Systems drive both cash flow management and communication. As your systems get better, you or your employees will have to exert less and less effort. Without well-designed and successful operating systems, your business will be labor intensive. Once you have well-designed and successful operating systems, you will have a saleable business asset.

- Robert Kiyosaki

If people look inward, they would see the opportunities for greatness.

- Aliko Dangote

If you’re only willing to do what’s easy, life will be hard. But if you’re willing to do what’s hard, life will be easy.

- T. Harv Eker

The thing that I’m going to focus on today is essentially the cloud that has been over Nike’s head over the last couple years.

- Phil Knight

“Trust me.” That’s what a CEO says every day to her employees. Trust me: This will be a good company. Trust me: This will be good for your career. Trust me: This will be good for your life. A layoff breaks that trust. In order to rebuild trust, you have to come clean.

- Ben Horowitz

Ability can take you to the top, but it takes character to keep you there.

- Zig Ziglar

Rivalry causes us to overemphasize old opportunities and slavishly copy what has worked in the past.

- Peter Thiel

Somebody once said that in looking for people to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. And if you don’t have the first, the other two will kill you. You think about it; it’s true. If you hire somebody without [integrity], you really want them to be dumb and lazy.

- Warren Buffett

Until you are happy with who you are, you will never be happy because of what you have.

- Zig Ziglar

Life’s too short to fight the forces of change. Life’s too short to hate what you do all day. Life’s way too short to make mediocre stuff.

- Seth Godin

When I think about parallels between myself and an Olympian, I believe that success in the world of business is underpinned by very similar principles of perseverance and hard work.

- Lakshmi Mittal

Well private money can take risks in a way that government money often isn’t willing to.

- Bill Gates

If you concentrate on what you have, you will always end up having more. If you focus on what you don’t have, you will never, ever have enough.

- Oprah Winfrey

To be a champion, you have to learn to handle stress and pressure. But if you’ve prepared mentally and physically, you don’t have to worry.

- Harvey Mackay

We knew that Lyft was going to raise a ton of money. And we are going [to their investors], Just so you know, we’re going to be fund-raising after this, so before you decide whether you want to invest in them, just make sure you know that we are going to be fund-raising immediately after.

- Travis Kalanick

St Patrick was a Roman Briton of good family dwelling probably in the Severn valley.

- Winston Churchill

We shall see how the counsels of prudence and restraint may become the prime agents of mortal danger, how the middle course adopted from desires for safety and a quiet life may be found to lead direct to the bull’s-eye of disaster.

- Winston Churchill

There is no man living that can not do more than he thinks he can.

- Henry Ford

Losing an A is a sin. Love ‘em, hug ‘em, kiss ‘em, don’t lose them! We conduct postmortems on every A we lose and hold management accountable for losses.

- Jack Welch

What I most identify with is effortless fashion, looking as if someone’s not put a lot of effort into their look.

- Sara Blakely

In the United States, where we have more land than people, it is not at all difficult for persons in good health to make money.

- P.T. Barnum

Money was never a big motivation for me, except as a way to keep score. The real excitement is playing the game.

- Donald Trump

You can dramatize your ideas in business or in any other aspect of your life. It’s easy.

- Dale Carnegie

In any human interaction, the required amount of communication is inversely proportional to the level of trust.

- Ben Horowitz

I look at Facebook as being more conscientious about operator concerns, we are not 100 percent there, but we are finding consensus.

- Jon Fredrik Baksaas

The people of Southwest have always been my pride, my joy and my love. Their indomitable dedication and esprit de corps have taken Southwest from a three-airplane dream to a 500-airplane reality.

- Herb Kelleher

Growth demands a temporary surrender of security. It may mean giving up familiar but limiting patterns, safe but unrewarding work, values no longer believed in, and relationships that have lost their meaning.

- John C. Maxwell

It’s the little things that are vital. Little things make big things happen.

- John Wooden

Out the right product is the innovator’s job, not the customer’s job.

- Ben Horowitz

Do not be embarrassed by your failures, learn from them and start again.

- Richard Branson

You have to have a dream, whether big or small. Then plan, focus, work hard and be very determined to achieve your goals.

- Henry Sy

Many persons call a doctor when all they want is an audience.

- Dale Carnegie

As a businessperson, I don’t have the power to change the government. That is in the hands of the political leaders. However, as a taxpayer, we have the right to be critical of the government and demand change.

- Tadashi Yanai

I never hid my thoughts or feelings. During a business meeting I could get so emotionally charged and involved that I’d stammer out what others might consider to be outrageous things like, My six year old could do better than that! Or Don’t Walter Cronkite me!

- Solutions

As Google CEO Larry Page put it in his 2014 TED talk: “The main thing that has caused companies to fail, in my view, is that they missed the future.

- Jack Welch

Pick the best people, face the reality (the way it is), speak with candor to everything, never lose sight of the relationship with the constituency.

- Jack Welch

In the end, the customer doesn’t know, or care, if you are small or large as an organization. She or he only focuses on the garmenthanging on the rail in the store.

- Giorgio Armani

Surprises and reverses can serve as an incentive for great accomplishment. There are no rules here, we’re just trying to accomplish something.

- Thomas Edison

It is unwise to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money, that is all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything because the thing you bought was incapable of doing what it was bought to do. The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot . .

- Zig Ziglar

But iteration without a bold plan won’t take you from 0 to 1.

- Peter Thiel

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

I would like to be remembered, if I am remembered at all, as being a catalyst for change in the world, change for good.

- Rupert Murdoch

I don’t want to hear the specials. If they’re so special, put ’em on the menu.

- Jerry Seinfeld

My biggest motivation? Just to keep challenging myself. I see life almost like one long University education that I never had — everyday I’m learning something new.

- Richard Branson

Big companies have trouble with innovation. Innovation is about bad ideas, or ideas that look like bad ideas. That’s the fundamental thing.

- Ben Horowitz

Today, if you want to access a typical out-of-print book, you have only one choice – fly to one of a handful of leading libraries in the country and hope to find it in the stacks.

- Sergey Brin

If you ask an economist what’s driven economic growth, it’s been major advances in things that mattered – the mechanization of farming, mass manufacturing, things like that. The problem is, our society is not organized around doing that.

- Larry Page

Windows is probably the most important product in the entire PC industry. Everything we do in terms of supporting touch, new hardware, accessibility has incredible impact.

- Bill Gates

My son likes to go see mines and electric plants, or the Large Hadron Collider, and we’ve had a chance to see a lot of interesting stuff.

- Bill Gates

Before spending time on a stress-inducing question or problem, consider this: If you can’t define it or act upon it, forget it.

- Timothy Ferriss

I don’t think so, in that Virgin is already a global brand. Brands like Amazon have had to spend hundreds of millions of pounds you know, building their brands, whereas Virgin is already well-known around the world.

- Richard Branson

A business that looks orderly says to your customer that your people know what they’re doing.

- Michael Gerber

If your offering itself isn’t remarkable, then it’s invisible — no matter how much you spend on well-crafted advertising.

- Seth Godin

Inflation is taking up the poverty line, and poverty is not just economic but defined by way of health and education.

- Azim Premji

FATHER FORGETS W. Livingston Larned Listen, son: I am saying this as you lie asleep, one little paw crumpled under your cheek and the blond curls stickily wet on your damp forehead. I have stolen into your room alone. Just a few minutes ago, as I sat reading my paper in the library, a stifling wave of remorse swept over me. Guiltily I came to your bedside. There are the things I was thinking, son: I had been cross to you. I scolded you as you were dressing for school because you gave your face merely a dab with a towel. I took you to task for not cleaning your shoes. I called out angrily when you threw some of your things on the floor. At breakfast I found fault, too. You spilled things. You gulped down your food. You put your elbows on the table. You spread butter too thick on your bread. And as you started off to play and I made for my train, you turned and waved a hand and called, ‘Goodbye, Daddy!’ and I frowned, and said in reply, ‘Hold your shoulders back!’ Then it began all over again in the late afternoon. As I came up the road I spied you, down on your knees, playing marbles. There were holes in your stockings. I humiliated you before your boyfriends by marching you ahead of me to the house. Stockings were expensive – and if you had to buy them you would be more careful! Imagine that, son, from a father! Do you remember, later, when I was reading in the library, how you came in timidly, with a sort of hurt look in your eyes? When I glanced up over my paper, impatient at the interruption, you hesitated at the door. ‘What is it you want?’ I snapped. You said nothing, but ran across in one tempestuous plunge, and threw your arms around my neck and kissed me, and your small arms tightened with an affection that God had set blooming in your heart and which even neglect could not wither. And then you were gone, pattering up the stairs. Well, son, it was shortly afterwards that my paper slipped from my hands and a terrible sickening fear came over me. What has habit been doing to me? The habit of finding fault, of reprimanding – this was my reward to you for being a boy. It was not that I did not love you; it was that I expected too much of youth. I was measuring you by the yardstick of my own years. And there was so much that was good and fine and true in your character. The little heart of you was as big as the dawn itself over the wide hills. This was shown by your spontaneous impulse to rush in and kiss me good night. Nothing else matters tonight, son. I have come to your bedside in the darkness, and I have knelt there, ashamed! It is a feeble atonement; I know you would not understand these things if I told them to you during your waking hours. But tomorrow I will be a real daddy! I will chum with you, and suffer when you suffer, and laugh when you laugh. I will bite my tongue when impatient words come. I will keep saying as if it were a ritual: ‘He is nothing but a boy – a little boy!’ I am afraid I have visualized you as a man. Yet as I see you now, son, crumpled and weary in your cot, I see that you are still a baby. Yesterday you were in your mother’s arms, your head on her shoulder. I have asked too much, too much. Instead of condemning people, let’s try to understand them. Let’s try to figure out why they do what they do. That’s a lot more profitable and intriguing than criticism; and it breeds sympathy, tolerance and kindness. ‘To know all is to forgive.

- Dale Carnegie

It’s vital that you accept yourself and learn to be happy with who God made you to be. If you want to truly enjoy your life, you must be at peace with yourself.

- Joel Olsteen

Your job is not to judge. Your job is not to figure out if someone deserves something. Your job is to lift the fallen, to restore the broken, and to heal the hurting.

- Joel Olsteen

In the 20th century, the United States endured two world wars and other traumatic and expensive military conflicts; the Depression; a dozen or so recessions and financial panics; oil shocks; a flu epidemic; and the resignation of a disgraced president. Yet the Dow rose from 66 to 11,497.

- Warren Buffett

I’d never worked in fashion or retail. I just needed an undergarment that didn’t exist.

- Sara Blakely

There are no big problems, there are just a lot of little problems.

- Henry Ford

Challenges will present us a good opportunity to improve productivity.

- Cheng Yu-tung

The best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good men to do what he wants done, and self-restraint to keep form meddling with them while they do it.

- Theodore Roosevelt

Once we assembled the entire package, Mike named it Netscape SuiteSpot, as it would be the “suite” that displaced Microsoft’s BackOffice. We lined everything up for a major launch on March 5, 1996, in New York. Then, just two weeks before the launch, Marc, without telling Mike or me, revealed the entire strategy to the publication Computer Reseller News. I was livid. I immediately sent him a short email: To: Marc Andreessen Cc: Mike Homer From: Ben Horowitz Subject : Launch I guess we’re not going to wait until the 5th to launch the strategy. — Ben Within fifteen minutes, I received the following reply. To: Ben Horowitz Cc: Mike Homer, Jim Barksdale (CEO), Jim Clark (Chairman) From: Marc Andreessen Subject: Re: Launch Apparently you do not understand how serious the situation is. We are getting killed killed killed out there. Our current product is radically worse than the competition. We’ve had nothing to say for months. As a result, we’ve lost over $3B in market capitalization. We are now in danger of losing the entire company and it’s all server product management’s fault. Next time do the fucking interview yourself. Fuck you, Marc I received this email the same day that Marc appeared barefoot and sitting on a throne on the cover of Time magazine. When I first saw the cover, I felt thrilled. I had never met anyone in my life who had been on the cover of Time. Then I felt sick. I brought both the magazine and the email home to Felicia to get a second opinion. I was very worried. I was twenty-nine years old, had a wife and three children, and needed my job. She looked at the email and the magazine cover and said, “You need to start looking for a job right away.” In the end, I didn’t get fired and over the next two years, SuiteSpot grew from nothing to a $400 million a year business. More shocking, Marc and I eventually became friends; we’ve been friends and business partners ever since. People often ask me how we’ve managed to work effectively across three companies over eighteen years. Most business relationships either become too tense to tolerate or not tense enough to be productive after a while. Either people challenge each other to the point where they don’t like each other or they become complacent about each other’s feedback and no longer benefit from the relationship. With Marc and me, even after eighteen years, he upsets me almost every day by finding something wrong in my thinking, and I do the same for him. It works.

- Ben Horowitz

Hong Kong has remained a strong financial centre. It has a solid business environment and geographically, it is well located, being next to China. During this time, there is no city that can match it.

- Lee Shau Kee

What a man’s mind can create, man’s character can control.

- Thomas Edison

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

If you have integrity, nothing else matters. If you don’t have integrity, nothing else matters.

- Harvey Mackay

Among the world’s 500 largest companies, not one has completely relied on its own growth to develop.

- Wang Jianlin

The jack-of-all-trades seldom is good at any. Concentrate all of your efforts on one definite chief aim.

- Napoleon Hill

You will have everything in life you want, if you will just help other people get what they want.

- Zig Ziglar

Like my friend Warren Buffett, I feel particularly lucky to do something every day that I love to do. He calls it ‘tap-dancing to work.

- Bill Gates

Game-playing is more fun when it’s virtual because you’re more successful. … in reality, only one person gets to be LeBron

- Larry Ellison

Thank God for what He’s already done in your life. Thank Him for the victories in your past. Thank Him for how far He’s already brought you. And then take it one step further. Thank Him in advance for the victories He has planned ahead for you. Thank Him for the new doors He’s opening. Thank Him for the situations He’s turning around. Thank Him for the favor He has in your future. If you do that, you will feel a new joy rising up on the inside. You will feel your faith increase. You won’t have that victim mentality; you will have a victor mentality. One thing I’ve learned is you cannot praise and stay defeated at the same time. You cannot give God thanks and stay down and discouraged. Put on the Garment of Praise.

- Joel Olsteen

Baldwin thought Europe was a bore, and Chamberlain thought it was only a greater Birmingham.

- Winston Churchill

Happens to every guy sometimes this does.

- Yoda

Business in Russia was not being done like in the West, with contracts. In Russia, hundreds of millions of dollars were going forward and backward by word of mouth.

- David Reuben

That’s the hard thing about hard things—there is no formula for dealing with them.

- Ben Horowitz

I’ve been an entrepreneur since I was 18. I started a company with a bunch of buddies that got funded in my senior year, and that’s when I finished school. It was called Scour, a peer-to-peer service, file-sharing.

- Travis Kalanick

Spend zero time on what you could have done, and devote all of your time on what you might do. Because in the end, nobody cares; just run your company.

- Ben Horowitz

When we don’t forgive, we’re not hurting the other person. We’re not hurting the company that did us wrong. We’re not hurting God. We’re only hurting ourselves.

- Joel Olsteen

Movies can and do have tremendous influence in shaping young lives in the realm of entertainment towards the ideals and objectives of normal adulthood.

- Walt Disney

I strongly believe that missionaries make better products. They care more. For a missionary, it’s not just about the business. There has to be a business, and the business has to make sense, but that’s not why you do it. You do it because you have something meaningful that motivates you.

- Jeff Bezos

On top of this, if you do great work you gain the reward of knowing you’re doing great work. Your day snaps into alignment with your dreams, and you no longer have to pretend you’re mediocre. You’re free to contribute.

- Seth Godin

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