101 Motivational Business Quotes

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Running a business is like riding on a roller coaster. Although it is fun and exciting, there will be times when you’ll be scared and feel powerless. During the bad times there isn’t much you can do, other than to keep on pushing forward.

So in that spirit, here are 101 quotes that will motivate you to push forward.

1. The critical ingredient is getting off your butt and doing something. It’s as simple as that. A lot of people have ideas, but there are few who decide to do something about them now. Not tomorrow. Not next week. But today. The true entrepreneur is a doer, not a dreamer. – Nolan Bushnell
2. My son is now an ‘entrepreneur’. That’s what you’re called when you don’t have a job. – Ted Turner
3. Leadership is a potent combination of strategy and character. But if you must be without one, be without the strategy. – Norman Schwarzkopf
4. The golden rule for every business man is this: “Put yourself in your customer’s place. – Orison Swett Marden
5. I had to make my own living and my own opportunity! But I made it! Don’t sit down and wait for the opportunities to come. Get up and make them! – C.J. Walker
6. 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
7. Life is too complicated not to be orderly. – Martha Stewart
8. The winners in life think constantly in terms of I can, I will, and I am. Losers, on the other hand, concentrate their waking thoughts on what they should have or would have done, or what they can’t do. – Dennis Waitley
9. Business opportunities are like buses, there’s always another one coming. – Richard Branson
10. Leadership is doing what is right when no one is watching. – George Van Valkenburg
11. There is no royal, flower-strewn path to success. And if there is, I have not found it. For if I have accomplished anything in life, it is because I have been willing to work hard. – C.J. Walker
12. Business is more exciting than any game. – Lord Beaverbrook
13. Let every man be respected as an individual and no man idolized. – Albert Einstein
14. We are currently not planning on conquering the world. – Sergey Brin
15. If it really was a no-brainer to make it on your own in business there’d be millions of no-brained, harebrained, and otherwise dubiously brained individuals quitting their day jobs and hanging out their own shingles. Nobody would be left to round out the workforce and execute the business plan. – Bill Rancic
16. It takes more than capital to swing business. You’ve got to have the A. I. D. degree to get by — Advertising, Initiative, and Dynamics. – Ren Mulford Jr.
17. For all of its faults, it gives most hardworking people a chance to improve themselves economically, even as the deck is stacked in favor of the privileged few. Here are the choices most of us face in such a system: Get bitter or get busy. – Bill O’ Reilly
18. A man should never neglect his family for business. – Walt Disney
19. The only limits are, as always, those of vision. – James Broughton
20. To think is easy. To act is difficult. To act as one thinks is the most difficult. – Johann Wolfgang Von Goeth
21. I like thinking big. If you’re going to be thinking anything, you might as well think big. – Donald Trump
22. Nobody talks about entrepreneurship as survival, but that’s exactly what it is and what nurtures creative thinking. Running that first shop taught me business is not financial science; it’s about trading: buying and selling. – Anita Roddick
23. To waken interest and kindle enthusiasm is the sure way to teach easily and successfully. – Tryon Edwards
24. Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning. – Bill Gates
25. Success is often achieved by those who don’t know that failure is inevitable. – Coco Chanel
26. The competitor to be feared is one who never bothers about you at all, but goes on making his own business better all the time. – Henry Ford
27. The good or ill of a man lies within his own will. – Epictetus
28. I have known not a few men who, after reaching the summits of business success, found themselves miserable on attaining retirement age. They were so exclusively engrossed in their day to day affairs that they had no time for friend making. – B.C. Forbes
29. The cynic says, “One man can’t do anything”. I say, “Only one man can do anything.” - John W. Gardner
30. I feel that luck is preparation meeting opportunity. – Oprah Winfrey
31. If there is such a thing as good leadership, it is to give a good example. – Ingvar Kamprad
32. Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly and get on with improving your other innovations. – Steve Jobs
33. You’ve got to say, I think that if I keep working at this and want it badly enough I can have it. It’s called perseverance. – Lee Iacocca
34. The desire of knowledge, like the thirst for riches, increases ever with the acquisition of it. – Laurence Sterne
35. Success in business requires training and discipline and hard work. But if you’re not frightened by these things, the opportunities are just as great today as they ever were. – David Rockefeller
36. Well, you know, I was a human being before I became a businessman. – George Soros
37. Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it. – Dwight Eisenhower
38. If you did not look after today’s business then you might as well forget about tomorrow. – Isaac Mophatlane
39. The great accomplishments of man have resulted from the transmission of ideas of enthusiasm. – Thomas J. Watson
40. Yesterday’s home runs don’t win today’s games. – Babe Ruth
41. Being able to touch so many people through my businesses and make money while doing it, is a huge blessing. – Magic Johnson
42. Let us not look back in anger or forward in fear, but around in awareness. – James Thurber
43. The trick is in what one emphasizes. We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same. – Carlos Castaneda
44. The great leaders are like the best conductors – they reach beyond the notes to reach the magic in the players. – Blaine Lee
45. To think creatively, we must be able to look afresh at what we normally take for granted. – George Kneller
46. To the degree we’re not living our dreams; our comfort zone has more control of us than we have over ourselves. – Peter McWilliams
47. The enemy of the truth is very often not the lie – deliberate, contrived, and dishonest – but the myth-persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. – John F. Kennedy
48. Long-range planning works best in the short term. – Doug Evelyn
49. The NBA is never just a business. It’s always business. It’s always personal. All good businesses are personal. The best businesses are very personal. – Mark Cuban
50. You can fool all the people all the time if the advertising is right and the budget is big enough. – Joseph E. Levine
51. A business has to be involving, it has to be fun, and it has to exercise your creative instincts. – Richard Branson
52. The entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity. – Peter F. Drucker
53. No enterprise can exist for itself alone. It ministers to some great need, it performs some great service, not for itself, but for others.. or failing therein, it ceases to be profitable and ceases to exist. – Calvin Coolidge
54. Live daringly, boldly, fearlessly. Taste the relish to be found in competition – in having put forth the best within you. – Henry J. Kaiser
55. Winning is not a sometime thing; it’s an all time thing. You don’t win once in a while, you don’t do things right once in a while, you do them right all the time. Winning is habit. Unfortunately, so is losing. – Vince Lombardi
56. In all realms of life it takes courage to stretch your limits, express your power, and fulfill your potential. It’s no different in the financial realm. – Suze Orman
57. The expectations of life depend upon diligence; the mechanic that would perfect his work must first sharpen his tools. – Confucius
58. The first one gets the oyster the second gets the shell. – Andrew Carnegie
59. Hire character. Train skill. – Peter Schutz
60. The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency. – Bill Gates
61. Look well to this day. Yesterday is but a dream and tomorrow is only a vision. But today well lived makes every yesterday a dream of happiness and every tomorrow a vision of hope. Look well therefore to this day. – Francis Gray
62. Surviving a failure gives you more self-confidence. Failures are great learning tools.. but they must be kept to a minimum. – Jeffrey Immelt
63. Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve. Thoughts are things! And powerful things at that, when mixed with definiteness of purpose, and burning desire, can be translated into riches. – Napoleon Hill
64. It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change. – Charles Darwin
65. Industry is the soul of business and the keystone of prosperity. – Charles Dickens
66. I don’t pay good wages because I have a lot of money; I have a lot of money because I pay good wages. – Robert Bosch
67. People are definitely a company’s greatest asset. It doesn’t make any difference whether the product is cars or cosmetics. A company is only as good as the people it keeps. – Mary Kay Ash
68. In business, I’ve discovered that my purpose is to do my best to my utmost ability every day. That’s my standard. I learned early in my life that I had high standards. – Donald Trump
69. In the business world, everyone is paid in two coins: cash and experience. Take the experience first; the cash will come later. – Harold Geneen
70. To be successful, you have to have your heart in your business, and your business in your heart. – Thomas Watson, Sr.
71. The absolute fundamental aim is to make money out of satisfying customers. – John Egan
72. There are a lot of things that go into creating success. I don’t like to do just the things I like to do. I like to do things that cause the company to succeed. I don’t spend a lot of time doing my favorite activities. – Michael Dell
73. I have found no greater satisfaction than achieving success through honest dealing and strict adherence to the view that, for you to gain, those you deal with should gain as well. – Alan Greenspan
74. You must be the change you wish to see in the world. – Mahatma Gandhi
75. Let’s be honest. There’s not a business anywhere that is without problems. Business is complicated and imperfect. Every business everywhere is staffed with imperfect human beings and exists by providing a product or service to other imperfect human beings. – Bob Parsons
76. You need to be aware of what others are doing, applaud their efforts, acknowledge their successes, and encourage them in their pursuits. When we all help one another, everybody wins. – Jim Stovall
77. The only way around is through. – Robert Frost
78. You only have to do a very few things right in your life so long as you don’t do too many things wrong. – Warren Buffett
79. The noblest search is the search for excellence – Lyndon B. Johnson
80. The man who does not work for the love of work but only for money is not likely to neither make money nor find much fun in life. – Charles M. Schwab
81. You must remain focused on your journey to greatness. – Les Brown
82. Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing. – Theodore Roosevelt
83. Where there is an open mind, there will always be a frontier. – Charles F. Kettering
84. Whether you think you can or whether you think you can’t, you’re right! – Henry Ford
85. You must either modify your dreams or magnify your skills. – Jim Rohn
86. Who likes not his business, his business likes not him. – William Hazlitt
87. The new source of power is not money in the hands of a few, but information in the hands of many. – John Naisbitt
88. The man who will use his skill and constructive imagination to see how much he can give for a dollar, instead of how little he can give for a dollar, is bound to succeed. – Henry Ford
89. It’s through curiosity and looking at opportunities in new ways that we’ve always mapped our path at Dell. There’s always an opportunity to make a difference. – Michael Dell
90. 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
91. Winners take time to relish their work, knowing that scaling the mountain is what makes the view from the top so exhilarating. – Denis Waitley
92. Management is nothing more than motivating other people. – Le Iacocca
93. Motivation is the art of getting people to do what you want them to do because they want to do it. – Dwight D. Eisenhower
94. The most serious mistakes are not being made as a result of wrong answers. The truly dangerous thing is asking the wrong question. – Peter Drucker
95. Why did I want to win? Because I didn’t want to lose! – Max Schmelling
96. To succeed in business, to reach the top, an individual must know all it is possible to know about that business. – J. Paul Getty
97. To win without risk is to triumph without glory. – Pierre Corneille
98. To succeed… You need to find something to hold on to, something to motivate you, something to inspire you. – Tony Dorsett
99. Statistics suggest that when customers complain, business owners and managers ought to get excited about it. The complaining customer represents a huge opportunity for more business. – Zig Ziglar
100. I wasn’t satisfied just to earn a good living. I was looking to make a statement. – Donald Trump
101. Whether it’s Google or Apple or free software, we’ve got some fantastic competitors and it keeps us on our toes. – Bill Gates

Do you know of any other good motivational business quotes?