Thomas Edison said that genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. I’ve been collecting inspiration and sayings in my journals for years. But I’m not sure that I’ve ever worked hard enough to get to genius level.
Nonetheless, from my personal journals, here are 212 business quotes to inspire you:
- “Screw it, let’s do it!” -Richard Branson
- “Rule #1. Never lose money. Rule #2. Don’t forget Rule #1.” -Warren Buffett
“During my 18 years I came to bat almost 10,000 times. I struck out about 1,700 times and walked maybe 1,800 times. You figure a ballplayer will average about 500 at bats a season. That means I played seven years without ever hitting the ball.” -Mickey Mantle- “Whatever you’re thinking, think bigger.” -Tony Hsieh
- “Diligence is the mother of good luck.” -Benjamin Franklin
- “Doing the unrealistic is easier than doing the realistic.” – Tim Ferriss
“Effective leadership is putting first things first. Effective management is discipline, carrying it out.” -Stephen Covey- “Whatever it is you’re scared of, do it.” – Neil Gaiman
- “A goal is a dream with a deadline.” -Napoleon Hill
- “The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.” – Muhammad Ali
- “People rarely succeed unless they have fun in what they are doing.” -Dale Carnegie
- “If people knew how hard I worked to achieve my mastery, it wouldn’t seem so wonderful after all.” -Michelangelo
“The loudest one in the room is the weakest one in the room.” – American Gangster (2007)- “To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.” -Elbert Hubbbard
- “Persistence can change failure into extraordinary achievement.” – Matt Biondi
- “A champion is someone who gets up when he can’t.” -Jack Dempsey
- “Almost all quality improvement comes via simplification of
design, manufacturing… layout, processes, and procedures.” -Tom Peters - “If there is one thing I’ve learned in my career, it is to do more of what’s working, and less of what’s not.” -Jimmy Wales
- “Either you run the day or the day runs you.” -Jim Rohn
- “You must knock on doors until your knuckles bleed. Doors will slam in your face. You must pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and knock again. It’s the only way to achieve your goals in life. -Michael Uslan
- “The stock market is filled with individuals who know the price of everything, but the value of nothing.” –Philip Fisher
- “If you’re going to try, go all the way. Otherwise don’t even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives, jobs. And maybe your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery, isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance. Of how much you really want to do it. And you’ll do it, despite rejection in the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine.” – Factotum (2005)
- “The beginning is the most important part of the work.” -Plato
- “Winning is habit. Unfortunately, so is losing.” -Vince Lombardi
- “No labor, however humbling, is dishonorable.” -The Talmud
- “I don’t read many business books. I read good fiction. Business is about people, so my favorite business books are anything by Dickens.” -Tom Peters
- “The secret of joy in work is contained in one word: excellence. To know how to do something well is to enjoy it.” -Pearl Buck
- “Some things you have to do every day. Eating seven apples on Saturday night instead of one a day just isn’t going to get the job done.” -Jim Rohn
- “The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one.” -Mark Twain
- “If investing is entertaining, if you’re having fun, you’re probably not making any money. Good investing is boring.” – George Soros
- “To kill time is not murder. It’s suicide.” -William James
- “If you don’t have integrity, you have nothing. You can’t buy it. You can have all the money in the world, but if you are not a moral and ethical person, you really have nothing.” –Henry Kravis
- “Give me a stock clerk with a goal, and I’ll give you a man who will make history. Give me a man with no goals, and I’ll give you a stock clerk.” -J.C. Penney
- “If you can’t feed a team with two pizzas, it’s too large.” –Jeff Bezos
- “If you’re not failing every now and again, it’s a sign you’re not doing anything innovative.” -Woody Allen
- “Nothing works better than just improving your product.” –Joel Spolsky
- “Change before you have to.” -Jack Welch
- “If you’re not a risk taker, you should get the hell out of business.” –Ray Kroc
- “The ideas I stand for are not mine. I borrowed them from Socrates. I swiped them from Chesterfield. I stole them from Jesus. And I put them in a book. If you don’t like their rules, whose would you use?” -Dale Carnegie
- “You don’t lead by hitting people over the head–that’s assault, not leadership.” -Dwight D. Eisenhower
- “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.” –Mark Twain
- “If two men on the same job agree all the time, one of them is unnecessary. If they disagree all the time, they are useless. -Darryl Zanuck
- “A 25% slice of something big is better than 100% slice of nothing.” –The Hustler (1949)
- “The obstacle is the path.” -Zen aphorism
- “It is not enough to be busy. The question is, what are we busy about?” -Henry David Thoreau
- “Things turn out best for the people who make the best of the way things turn out.” -John R. Wooden
- “In reading the lives of great men, I found that the first victory they won was over themselves. Self discipline with all of them came first.” -Harry S. Truman
- “To become financially independent you must turn part of your income into capital; turn capital into enterprise; turn enterprise into profit; turn profit into investment; and turn investment into financial independence.” -Jim Rohn
- “If there’s one thing I learned in prison it’s that money is not the prime commodity in our lives. Time is.” – Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010)
- “Never think that you’re not good enough yourself. A man should never think that. People will take you very much at your reckoning.” -Anthony Trollope
- “Some people believe that holding on and hanging in there are signs of great strength. However, there are times when it takes much more strength to know when to let go–and then do it.” -Ann Landers
- “With self discipline almost anything is possible.” -Theodore Roosevelt
- “In Search of Excellence – even the title – is a reminder that business isn’t dry, dreary, boring, or by the numbers. Life at work can be cool – and work that’s cool isn’t confined to Tiger Woods, Yo-Yo Ma, or Tom Hanks. It’s available to all of us and any of us.” -Tom Peters
- “I always tried to turn every disaster into an opportunity.” -John D. Rockefeller
- “I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.” -Thomas Jefferson
- “It’s not the will to win that matters—everyone has that. It’s the will to prepare to win that matters.” -Bear Bryant
- “The magic formula that successful businesses have discovered is to treat customers like guests and employees like people.” -Tom Peters
- “The bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet notwithstanding go out to meet it.” -Thucydides
- “Procrastination is the bad habit of putting of until the day after tomorrow what should have been done the day before yesterday.” -Napoleon Hill
- “Never let the fear of striking out get in your way.” -Babe Ruth
- “Time is the friend of the wonderful business, the enemy of the mediocre.” -Warren Buffett
- “An annuity is a very serious business; it comes over and over every year, and there is no getting rid of it.” –Sense and Sensibility
- “It takes many good deeds to build a good reputation, and only one bad one to lose it.” -Benjamin Franklin
- “A feast is made for laughter, and wine maketh merry, but money answereth all things.” –The Bible
- “The bottom line is, when people are crystal clear about the most important priorities of the organization and team they work with and prioritized their work around those top priorities, not only are they many times more productive, they discover they have the time they need to have a whole life.” -Stephen Covey
- “Life is not divided into semesters. You don’t get summers off, and very few employers are interested in helping you find yourself.” -Bill Gates
- “Patience, persistence and perspiration make an unbeatable combination for success.” -Napoleon Hill
- “Doing nothing is very hard to do. You never know when you’re finished.” -Leslie Nielsen
- “Today is life-the only life you are sure of. Make the most of today. Get interested in something. Shake yourself awake. Develop a hobby. Let the winds of enthusiasm sweep through you. Live today with gusto.” -Dale Carnegie
- “The purpose of a liberal education is to make you philosophical enough to accept the fact that you will never make much money.” -Unknown
- “I know what I have to do now, I’ve got to keep breathing because tomorrow the sun will rise. Who knows what the tide could bring?” –Cast Away (2000)
- “A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car, but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad.” -Theodore Roosevelt
- “Show me a good loser, and I’ll show you a loser.” – Vince Lombardi
- “Work is a necessary evil to be avoided.” -Mark Twain
- “One simply cannot pay tribute to Stephen Covey without saying at the outset that he was a lovely human being.” -Tom Peters
- “Work is a refuge of people who have nothing better to do.” -Oscar Wilde
- “The ultimate reason for setting goals is to entice you to become the person it takes to achieve them.”
- “Corporations no longer try to fit square pegs into round holes; they just fit them into square cubicles.” -Robert Brault
- “The closest to perfection a person ever comes is when he fills out a job application form.” -Stanley J. Randall
- “Investing without research is like playing stud poker and never looking at the cards.” – Peter Lynch
- “If you don’t have time to do it right, you must have time to do it over.” -Unknown
- “Just because people are doing extraordinary things doesn’t mean they’re not ordinary people.” -Laird Hamilton
- “Those who say it can’t be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.” -James A. Baldwin
- “Take risks. Do things you can’t imagine. ‘Cause hey, why not, right?” -Diane Keaton
- “Get action. Do things; be sane, don’t fritter away your time; create, act, take a place wherever you are and be somebody; get action. Seize the moment. Man was never intended to become an oyster.” -Theodore Roosevelt
- “Work hard, never give up, and don’t fall in love with yourself.” -Martha Sturdy
- “Don’t find fault. Find a remedy.” -Henry Ford
- “Appear tougher or cooler or funnier than you feel and there is a chance you might make it.” -Craig Ferguson
- “Take your work seriously, but never yourself.” – Margo Fonteyn
- “I don’t know where I’m going from here, but I promise it won’t be boring.” – David Bowie
- “It’s not so much how busy you are but why you are busy. The bee is praised. The mosquito is swatted.” -Mary O’Connor
- “I’ve been absolutely terrified every moment of my life, and I’ve never let it keep me from doing a single thing that I wanted to do.” -Georgia O’Keeffe
- “Security isn’t what the wise person looks for; it’s opportunity.” -Earl Nightingale
- “When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better, too.” -Paulo Coelho
- “Big doesn’t necessarily mean better. Sunflowers aren’t better than violets.” -Edna Ferber
- “The best way to get approval is not to need it. This is equally true in art and business. And love. And sex. And just about everything worth having.” -Hugh MacLeod
- “Never ascribe to malice that which can adequately be explained by incompetence.” -Napoleon Bonaparte
- “If I had listened to the critics, I’d have died drunk in the gutter.” -Anton Chekhov
- “You have to learn to treat people as a resource. You have to ask not what do they cost, but what is the yield? What can they produce?” -Peter F. Drucker
- “Whatever you think can’t be done, somebody will come along and do it. A genius is the one most like himself.” -Thelonious Monk
- “Every morning, I get up and look through the Forbes list of the richest people in America. If I’m not there, I go to work.” -Robert Orben
- “What is harder than rock or softer than water? Yet soft water hollows out hard rock. Persevere.” -Ovid
- “A rich man’s joke is always funny.” -Thomas Browne
- “There is no disinfectant like success.” – Daniel J. Boorstin
- “When a man tells you he got rich through hard work, ask him, ‘Whose?’” -Don Marquis
- “Prosperity is a great teacher. Adversity, a greater.” -William Hazlitt
- “Bills travel through the mail at twice the speed of checks.” -J. Steven Wright
- “Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.” -Cyril Northcote Parkinson (Parkinson’s Law)
- “If you can count your money, you don’t have a billion dollars.” -Paul Getty
- “Formula for success: Underpomise and overdeliver.” -Tom Peters
- “A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of.” -Jane Austen
- “A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, bot by the desire to beat others.” -Ayn Rand
- “What’s the use of happiness? It can’t buy you money.” -Henny Youngman
- “One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries.” -A.A. Milne
- “Before borrowing money from a friend, decide which you need most.” -Unknown
- “You ain’t gonna learn what you don’t wanna know.” -Jerry Garcia
- “All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.” -Samuel Butler
- “If men could regard the events of their own lives with more open minds, they would frequently discover that they did not really discover that they did not really desire the things they failed to obtain.” -Andre Maurois
- “Another good thing about being poor is that when you are 70, your children will not have declared you legally insane in order to gain control of your estate.” -Woody Allen
- “It takes as much stress to be a success as it does to be a failure.” -Emilio James Trujillo
- “If you love your job, you haven’t worked a day in your life.” -Tommy Lasorda
- “I try to buy stock in businesses that are so wonderful that an idiot can run them. Because sooner or later, one will.” -Warren Buffett
- “Wednesdays are like Mondays in the middle of the week.” -Lee Fox Williams
- “It is the working man who is the happy man. It is the idle man who is the miserable man.” -Benjamin Franklin
- “Work is either fun or drudgery. It depends on your attitude. I like fun.” – Colleen C. Barrett
- “But until a person can say deeply and honestly, ‘I am what I am today because of the choices I made yesterday,’ that person cannot say, ‘I choose otherwise.’” -Stephen Covey
- “Your business clothes are naturally attracted to staining liquids. This attraction is strongest just before an important meeting.” -Scott Adams
- “Reduce your plan to writing. The moment you complete this, you will have definitely given concrete form to the intangible desire.” -Napoleon Hill
- “How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct.” -Benjamin Disraeli
- “Don’t be afraid to give your best to what seemingly are small jobs. Every time you conquer one it makes you that much stronger. If you do the little jobs well, the big ones will tend to take care of themselves.” -Dale Carnegie
- “The longer the title, the less important the job.” -George McGovern
- “An element of conflict in any discussion is a very good thing. It shows everybody’s taking part and nobody’s left out. I like that.” – Harvey (1950)
- “If I had a dollar for every time someone came to me with not only a problem but also a possible solution to that problem, I’d have $6.” -Brian Vaszily
- “During my 18 years I came to bat almost 10,000 times. I struck out about 1,700 times and walked maybe 1,800 times. You figure a ballplayer will average about 500 at bats a season. That means I played seven years without ever hitting the ball.” -Mickey Mantle
- “So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work.” -Peter F. Drucker
- “The simple act of paying positive attention to people has a great deal to do with productivity.” -Tom Peters
- “It is easy to fool yourself. It is possible to fool the people you work for. It is more difficult to fool the people you work with. But it is almost impossible to fool the people who work under you.” -Harry B. Thayer
- “You must either modify your dreams or magnify your skills.” -Jim Rohn
- “Without work, all life goes rotten. But when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.” -Albert Camus
- “If you don’t have integrity, you have nothing. You can’t buy it. You can have all the money in the world, but if you are not a moral and ethical person, you really have nothing.” -Henry Kravis
- “There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure.” -Colin Powell
- Why do people say they wish every day was Friday? If it was always Friday, we’d be hever every freakin’ day.” -Ed Bernard
- “An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a narrow field.” -Niels Bohr
- “Anything that is measured and watched improves.” – Bob Parsons
- “Consultants have credibility because they are not dumb enough to work at your company.” -Scott Adams
- “Success is nothing more than a few simple disciplines, practiced every day.” -Jim Rohn
- “Regardless of age, regardless of position, regardless of the business we happen to be in, all of us need to understand the importance of branding. We are CEOs of our own companies: Me, Inc. To be in business today, our most important job is to be head marketer for the brand called You.” -Tom Peters
- “The idea behind writing affirmations is that you simply write down your goals 15 times a day and somehow, as if by magic, coincidences start to build until you achieve your objective against all odds. Prior to my Dilbert success, I used affirmations on a string of hugely unlikely goals that all materialized in ways that seemed miraculous. Some of
the successes you can explain away by assuming I’m hugely talented and incredibly sexy, and therefore it is no surprise that I accomplished my goals despite seemingly long odds.But some of my goals involved neither hard work nor skill of any kind. I succeeded with those too, against all odds. Those are harder to explain, at least for me, since the most common explanation is that they are a delusion. I found my experience with affirmations fascinating and puzzling, and so I wrote about it.” – Scott Adams - “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.” -Mark Twain
- “Are you bored with life? Then throw yourself into some work you believe in with all your heart, live for it, die for it, and you will find happiness that you had thought could never be yours.” -Dale Carnegie
- “To laugh often and much, to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children, to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends, to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others, to leave the world a little better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition, to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is the meaning of success. -Ralph Waldo Emerson
- “There is a purpose to our lives, even if it is sometimes hidden from us, and even if the biggest turning points and heartbreaks only make senses as we look back, not as we are experiencing them. So we might as well live life as if, as the poet Rumi put it, ‘Everything is rigged in our favor.’” -Arianna Huffington.
- “When you reach the top, keep climbing.” -Unknown
- “If you set your goals ridiculously high and it’s a failure, you will fail above everyone else’s success.” -James Cameron
- “Trust your mother, but cut the cards.” -Unknown
- “Take the initiative. Go to work, and above all, cooperate and don’t hold back on one another or try to gain at the expense of another. Any success in such lopsidedness will be increasingly short-lived.” -Buckminster Fuller
- “The reward of a thing well done is to have done it.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson
- “Do not fear mistakes. There are none.” -Miles Davis
- “Never mistake motion for action.” -Ernest Hemingway
- “The secret is to have a sense of yourself, your real self, your unique self. And not just once in a while, or once a day, but all through the day, the week, and life.” -Bill Murray
- “You don’t need a weather man to know which way the wind blows.” -Bob Dylan
- “There is no reason not to follow your heart.” -Steve Jobs
- “Beware the fury of a patient man.” -John Dryden
- “When you’re in a rut, you have to question everything except your ability to get out of it.” -Twyla Tharp
- “What counts is not necessarily the size of the dog in the fight–it’s the size of the fight in the dog.” -Dwight D. Eisenhower
- “Confidence doesn’t come out of nowhere. It’s a result of something–hours and days and weeks and years of constant work and dedication.” -Roger Staubach
- “He who desires but acts now, breeds pestilence.” -William Blake
- “Spectacular achievements are always preceded by unspectacular preparation.” -Roger Staubach
- “A work is perfectly finished only when nothing can be added to it and nothing taken away. -Joseph Joubert
- “Whatever you like doing, do it! And keep doing it. Work hard! In the end, passion and hard work beat out natural talent. (And anyway, if you love what you do, it’s not really ‘work’ anyway.” -Pete Doctor
- “A successful man is one who makes more money than his wife can spend. A successful woman is one who can find such a man.” -Lana Turner
- “You practice and you get better. It’s very simple.” -Philip Glass
- “Money won’t buy happiness, but it will pay the salaries of a large research staff to study the problem.” -Bill Vaughan
- “Where large sums of money are involved, it is advisable to trust nobody.” -Agatha Christie
- “I know of nothing more despicable and pathetic than a man who devotes all of the hours of the waking day to the making of money.” -John D. Rockefeller
- “Remember this saying: ‘The good paymaster is lord of another man’s purse.’ He that is known to pay punctually and exactly to the time he promises may at any time and on any occasion raise all the money his friends can spare.” -Benjamin Franklin
- “A business that makes nothing but money is a poor business.” -Henry Ford
- “It isn’t necessary to be rich and famous to be happy. It’s only necessary to be rich.” -Alan Alda
- “A fool and his money are soon parted.” -Unknown
- “Being rich is having money. Being wealthy is having time.” -Stephen King
- “Money is like manure–of very little use except it be spread.” -Francis Bacon
- “Always borrow money from a pessimist. He doesn’t expect to be paid back.” -Unknown
- “No one would remember the Good Samaritan if he’d only had good intentions. He had money as well.” -Margaret Thatcher
- “I’ve never been poor, only broke. Being poor is a frame of mind. Being broke is only a temporary situation.” -Mike Todd
- “A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining and wants it back the minute it begins to rain.” -Mark Twain
- “Never spend your money before you have it.” -Thomas Jefferson
- “Modern man drives a mortgaged car over a bond-financed highway on credit-card gas.” -Karl Wilson
- “Beware of little expenses. A small leak will sink a great ship.” -Benjamin Franklin
- “The surest way to establish your credit is to work yourself into the position of not needing any.” -Maurice Switzer
- “It’s good to have money and the things that money can buy, but it’s good, too, to make sure you haven’t lost the things that money can’t buy.” -George Horace Lorimer
- “If you think no one cares if you’re alive, try missing a couple of car payments.” -Karl Wilson
- “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty ought and six, result misery.” –David Copperfield
- “The speed of a runaway horse counts for nothing” -Jean Cocteau
- “Knowledge is power.” -Francis Bacon
- “You can’t try to do things. You must simply do things.” -Ray Bradbury
- “One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.” -Will Durant
- “It is impossible to defeat an ignorant man in an argument.” William G. McAdoo
- “The more time you spend contemplating what you should have done…you lose valuable time planning what you can and will do.” -Lil Wayne
- “I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.” -Socrates
- “It takes less time to do a thing right than it does to explain why you did it wrong.” -Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
- “Others have been here before me, and I walk in their footsteps. The books I have read were composed by generations of fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, teachers and disciples. I am the sum total of their experiences, their quests. And so are you.” -Elie Wiesel
- “Big goals get big results. No goals get no results or somebody else’s results.” -Mark Victor Hansen
- “It is not always by plugging away at a difficulty and sticking at it that one overcomes it, but, rather, often by working on the one next to it. Certain people and certain things require to be approached on an angle.” -Matthew Arnold
- “The spirit, the will to win, and the will to excel are the things that endure. These qualities are so much more important than the events that occur.” -Vince Lombardi
- “One of the things I learned the hard way was that it doesn’t pay to get discouraged. Keeping busy and making optimism a way of life can restore your faith in yourself.” -Lucille Ball
- “Some people say I have attitude. Maybe I do. But I think you have to. You have to believe in yourself when no one else does. That makes you a winner right there. -Venus Williams
- “If money be not they servant, it will be thy master. The covetous man cannot so properly be said to possess wealth, as that me said to possess him.” -Francis Bacon
- “It’s what you learn after you know it all that’s important.” -Jimmy Wiliams
- “Don’t compromise yourself. You’re all you’ve got.” -Janis Joplin
- “If you can dream it, you can do it.” -Walt Disney
- “Be yourself. The world worships an original.” -Ingrid Bergman
- “Just don’t give up trying to do what you really want to do. Where there is love and inspiration, I don’t think you can go wrong.” -Ella Fitzgerald
What good inspirational business quotes do you like?