My Favorite Quotes on Entrepreneurship and Success
Ever since the first settlement of Europeans in the New World, America has been a magnet for people seeking adventure, fleeing from tyranny, or simply trying to make a better life for themselves and their children.
Milton Friedman
Aim for success, not perfection. Never give up your right to be wrong, because then you will lose the ability to learn new things and move forward with your life. Remember that fear always lurks behind perfectionism.
David M. Burns
Don’t limit yourself. Many people limit themselves to what they think they can do. You can go as far as your mind lets you. What you believe, remember, you can achieve.
Mary Kay Ash
If you want to be happy, set a goal that commands your thoughts, liberates your energy, and inspires your hopes.
Andrew Carnegie
If there is no struggle, there is no progress.
Frederick Douglass
You build on failure. You use it as a stepping-stone. Close the door on the past. You don’t try to forget the mistakes, but you don’t dwell on it. You don’t let it have any of your energy, or any of your time, or any of your space.
Johnny Cash
I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.
Nelson Mandela
Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.
Robert F. Kennedy
Courage, then, and patience! Courage for the great sorrows of life, and patience for the small ones. And then when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace. God is awake.
Victor Hugo
All our dreams can come true if we have the courage to pursue them.
Walt Disney
The best revenge is massive success.
Frank Sinatra
The successful warrior is the average man, with laserlike focus.
Bruce Lee
Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It’s quite simple, really: Double your rate of failure. You are thinking of failure as the enemy of success. But it isn’t at all. You can be discouraged by failure or you can learn from it, so go ahead and make mistakes. Make all you can. Because remember that’s where you will find success.
Thomas J. Watson
The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
The greatest leader is not necessarily the one who does the greatest things. He is the one that gets the people to do the greatest things.
Ronald Reagan
The test of success is not what you do when you are on top. Success is how high you bounce when you hit the bottom.
George S. Patton, Jr.
The thing that motivates me is a very common form of motivation. And that is, with other folks counting on me, it’s so easy to be motivated.
Jeff Bezos
Motivation is simple. You eliminate those who are not motivated.
Lou Holtz
“It’s today,” squeaked Piglet.
“My favorite day,” said Pooh.
A. A. Milne
Energy and persistence conquer all things.
Benjamin Franklin
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
Do not be embarrassed by your failures, learn from them and start again.
Richard Branson
You’ve got to come up with the most positive things that can be said about the business and what you’re doing, even in the most adverse times. And you’ve got to believe. Only then can your team believe in you.
Charles Schwab
Failure is only the opportunity more intelligently to begin again. There is no disgrace in honest failure; there is disgrace in fearing to fail. What is past is useful only as it suggests ways and means for progress.
Henry Ford
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
You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something—your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
Steve Jobs
Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.
Elon Musk
An entrepreneur is someone who jumps off a cliff and builds a plane on the way down.
Reid Hoffman
What I know for sure is this: The big secret in life is that there is no big secret. Whatever your goal for this year is, you can get there—as long as you’re willing to be honest with yourself about the preparation and work involved. There are no back doors, no free rides.
Oprah Winfrey
You must be very patient, very persistent. The world isn’t going to shower gold coins on you just because you have a good idea. You’re going to have to work like crazy to bring that idea to the attention of people. They’re not going to buy it unless they know about it.
Herb Kelleher
The very first company I started failed with a great bang. The second one failed a little bit less, but still failed. The third one, you know, proper failed, but it was kind of okay. I recovered quickly. Number four almost didn’t fail. It still didn’t really feel great, but it did okay. Number five was PayPal.
Max Levchin
Out of life’s school of war: What does not destroy me, makes me stronger.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Develop success from failures. Discouragement and failure are two of the surest stepping-stones to success.
Dale Carnegie
If you work just for money, you’ll never make it, but if you love what you’re doing and you always put the customer first, success will be yours.
Ray Kroc
I am not a product of my circumstances. I am a product of my decisions.
Stephen Covey
Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Remember, you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world.
Harriet Tubman
Success is doing the thing that you want to do every single day and being around the people that you want to be around. It’s also knowing that you define who you are. That you don’t need anyone else’s validation, unless the validation is out of love.
Daymond John
Indomitable perseverance in a business, properly understood, always ensures ultimate success.
Cyrus McCormick
With engineering, I view this year’s failure as next year’s opportunity to try it again. Failures are not something to be avoided. You want to have them happen as quickly as you can so you can make progress rapidly.
Gordon Earle Moore
If your only goal is to become rich, you will never achieve it.
John D. Rockefeller
When you’re surrounded by people who share a passionate commitment around a common purpose, anything is possible.
Howard D. Schultz
The greatest real thrill that life offers is to create, to construct, to develop something useful. Too often we fail to recognize and pay tribute to the creative spirit. It is that spirit that creates our jobs.
Alfred Pritchard Sloan, Jr.
There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.
Samuel Moore “Sam” Walton
A man can succeed at almost anything for which he has unlimited enthusiasm.
Charles M. Schwab
Competition brings out the best in products and the worst in people.
David Sarnoff
When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor.
Elon Musk
If you think you can do a thing or think you can’t do a thing, you’re right.
Henry Ford
All business is personal. . . . Make your friends before you need them.
Robert Louis Johnson
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
There is an immutable conflict at work in life and in business, a constant battle between peace and chaos. Neither can be mastered, but both can be influenced. How you go about that is the key to success.
Phil Knight
Dollars have never been known to produce character, and character will never be produced by money. I’ll invest my money in people.
Will Kellogg
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
You can’t do it unless you can imagine it.
George Lucas
Success seems to be connected with action. Successful people keep moving. They make mistakes, but they don’t quit.
Conrad Nicholson Hilton
Give them quality. That’s the best kind of advertising in the world.
Milton Hershey
The biggest competitive advantage is to do the right thing at the worst time.
William Hewlett
It’s important to give a better country to your children, but it is more important to give better children to your country.
Carlos Slim Helú
I have this ability to find this hidden talent in people that sometimes even they didn’t know they had.
Berry Gordy, Jr.
Stephen Girard
Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.
Bill Gates
People ask me all the time, “How can I become a successful entrepreneur?” And I have to be honest: It’s one of my least favorite questions, because if you’re waiting for someone else’s advice to become an entrepreneur, chances are you’re not one.
Michael Dell
Thought, not money, is the real business capital.
Harvey Samuel Firestone
I have had all of the disadvantages required for success.
Larry Ellison
Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.
Thomas Edison
Everyone has an invisible sign hanging from their neck saying, “Make me feel important.” Never forget this message when working with people.
Mary Kay Ash
I think if you look at people, whether in business or government, who haven’t had any moral compass, who’ve just changed to say whatever they thought the popular thing was, in the end they’re losers.
Michael Bloomberg
Obviously everyone wants to be successful, but I want to be looked back on as being very innovative, very trusted and ethical, and ultimately making a big difference in the world.
Sergey Brin
It takes twenty years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.
Warren Buffett
It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.
Herman Melville
Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.
Henry David Thoreau
Try not to become a man of success. Rather become a man of value.
Albert Einstein
Stop chasing the money and start chasing the passion.
Tony Hsieh
I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
G. K. Chesterton
The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.
Helen Keller
The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.
Walt Disney
There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure.
Colin Powell
If you really want to do something, you’ll find a way. If you don’t, you’ll find an excuse.
Jim Rohn
I cannot give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure—it is: Try to please everybody.
Herbert Bayard Swope
Fall seven times and stand up eight.
Japanese proverb
Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.
Thomas Edison
Thomas Edison
I never dreamed about success, I worked for it.
Estée Lauder
Just when the caterpillar thought the world was ending, he turned into a butterfly.
Proverb
Whenever you see a successful person you only see the public glories, never the private sacrifices to reach them.
Vaibhav Shah
If you don’t value your time, neither will others. Stop giving away your time and talents—start charging for it.
Kim Garst
A successful man is one who can lay a firm foundation with the bricks others have thrown at him.
David Brinkley
No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.
Eleanor Roosevelt
The whole secret of a successful life is to find out what is one’s destiny to do, and then do it.
Henry Ford
If you’re going through hell, keep going.
Winston Churchill
The ones who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones that do.
Anonymous
What seems to us as bitter trials are often blessings in disguise.
Oscar Wilde
Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.
Albert Einstein
Your problem isn’t the problem. Your reaction is the problem.
Anonymous
You can do anything, but not everything.
Anonymous
If you want to achieve excellence, you can get there today. As of this second, quit doing less-than-excellent work.
Thomas J. Watson
You may only succeed if you desire succeeding; you may only fail if you do not mind failing.
Philippos
Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear—not absence of fear.
Mark Twain
Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.
Pablo Picasso
People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing—that’s why we recommend it daily.
Zig Ziglar
We become what we think about most of the time, and that’s the strangest secret.
Earl Nightingale
The best reason to start an organization is to make meaning; to create a product or service to make the world a better place.
Guy Kawasaki
Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it.
Maya Angelou
A real entrepreneur is somebody who has no safety net underneath them.
Henry Kravis
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
Mark Twain
Take up one idea. Make that one idea your life—think of it, dream of it, live on that idea. Let the brain, muscles, nerves, every part of your body, be full of that idea, and just leave every other idea alone. This is the way to success.
Swami Vivekananda
The number one reason people fail in life is because they listen to their friends, family, and neighbors.
Napoleon Hill
Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time.
George Bernard Shaw
You must expect great things of yourself before you can do them.
Michael Jordan
Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no help at all.
Dale Carnegie
You measure the size of the accomplishment by the obstacles you had to overcome to reach your goals.
Booker T. Washington
Real difficulties can be overcome; it is only the imaginary ones that are unconquerable.
Theodore N. Vail
Fortune sides with him who dares.
Virgil
Little minds are tamed and subdued by misfortune; but great minds rise above it.
Washington Irving
Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.
Truman Capote
A man can be as great as he wants to be. If you believe in yourself and have the courage, the determination, the dedication, the competitive drive and if you are willing to sacrifice the little things in life and pay the price for the things that are worthwhile, it can be done.
Vince Lombardi
Success is simple. Do what’s right, the right way, at the right time.
Arnold Glasow
Rest satisfied with doing well, and leave others to talk of you as they please.
Pythagoras
We mount to heaven mostly on the ruins of our cherished schemes, finding our failures were successes.
Amos Bronson Alcott
Along with success comes a reputation for wisdom.
Euripides
Success rarely brings satisfaction.
Baltasar Gracián
He that succeeds makes an important thing of the immediate task.
William Feather
In most things success depends on knowing how long it takes to succeed.
Montesquieu
Be kind to everyone on the way up; you’ll meet the same people on the way down.
Wilson Mizner
The most important single ingredient in the formula of success is knowing how to get along with people.
Theodore Roosevelt