Inspirational Quotes

Try not to become a man of success but a man of value.Albert Einstein

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put foundations under them.

Henry David Thoreau

Inspiration and genius--one and the same.Victor Hugo

To find what you seek in the road of life, the best proverb of all is that which says:

"Leave no stone unturned."Edward Bulwer Lytton

If you would create something,you must be something.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Every artist was first an amateur.Ralph Waldo Emerson

The more difficulties one has to encounter, within and without, the more significant and the higher in inspiration

his life will be.Horace Bushnell

Life has no smooth road for any of us; and in the bracing atmosphere of a high aim the very roughness stimulates the climber to steadier steps, till the legend, over steep

ways to the stars, fulfills itself. W. C. Doane

Experience is the child of thought, and thought is the child of action.

Benjamin Disraeli

Do we not all agree to call rapid thought and noble impulse by the name of inspiration?

George Eliot

No great man ever complains of want of opportunities.Ralph Waldo Emerson

Men do less than they ought,unless they do all they can.

Thomas Carlyle

Let thy words be few.Ecclesiastes 5:2 from Words of Wisdom

Happy are those who dream dreams and are ready to pay the price to make them come true.

Leon J. Suenes

The power of imagination makes us infinite.John Muir

First say to yourself what you would be;and then do what you have to do.

Epictetus

Goals and Goal Setting Quotations Related Links: Inspirational Quotes | Success

Quotes

The ability to convert ideas to things is the secret to outward success.

Henry Ward Beecher

The ability to concentrate and to use your time well is everything if you want to succeed in business--or

almost anywhere else for that matter.Lee Iacocca

A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds.

Francis Bacon

In everything the ends well defined are the secret of durable success.

Victor Cousins

Winning isn't everything, but wanting to win is.Vince Lombardi

Failures do what is tension relieving,while winners do what is goal achieving.

Dennis Waitley(as quoted in Brian Tracy's book, Eat That Frog)

A man should have any number of little aims about which he should be conscious and for which he should have names, but he should have neither

name for, nor consciousness concerning, the main aim of his life.

Samuel Butler

Goals are the fuel in the furnace of achievement.Brian Tracy, Eat that Frog

The great and glorious masterpiece ofman is to know how to live to purpose.

Michel de Montaigne

Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,or what's a heaven for?

Robert Browning

The significance of a man is not in what he attains but in what he longs to attain.

Kahlil Gibran

Every ceiling, when reached, becomes a floor, upon which one walks as a matter of course and

prescriptive right.Aldous Huxley

If you don't know where you are going,you'll end up someplace else.

Yogi Berra

Some men give up their designs when they have almost reached the goal; while others, on the

contrary, obtain a victory by exerting, at the last moment, more vigorous efforts than before.

Polybius

Life can be pulled by goals just as surely as it can be pushed by drives.

Viktor Frankl

The virtue lies in the struggle, not in the prize.Richard Monckton Milnes

To reach a port, we must sail—Sail, not tie at anchor—Sail, not drift.Franklin Roosevelt

There is no happiness except in the realization that we have accomplished something.

Henry Ford

Our plans miscarry because they have no aim. When a man does not know what harbor he is

making for, no wind is the right wind.Seneca

It is not enough to take steps which may some day lead to a goal; each step must be itself a goal and a

step likewise.Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Who aims at excellence will be above mediocrity; who aims at mediocrity will be far short of it.

Burmese Saying

In absence of clearly defined goals, we become strangely loyal to performing daily acts of trivia.

Author Unknown

Don't bunt. Aim out of the ballpark.David Ogilvy

There are two things to aim at in life; first to get what you want, and after that to enjoy it. Only the

wisest of mankind has achieved the second.Logan Pearsall Smith

Leadership QuotationsDo not follow where the path may lead.

Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.Harold R. McAlindon

(also attributed to Emerson and others)

Leadership: The art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

There go the people.I must follow them for I am their leader.

Alexandre Ledru-Rollin

What chance gathers she easily scatters. A great person attracts great people and knows how to hold

them together. Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

A general is just as good or just as bad as the troops under his command make him.General Douglas MacArthur

The real leader has no need to lead--he is content to point the way.

Henry Miller

Go to the people. Learn from them. Live with them. Start with what they know. Build with what they

have. The best of leaders when the job is done, when the task is accomplished, the people will say we

have done it ourselves.Lao Tzu

A leader is a dealer in hope.Napoleon Bonaparte

Rely on your own strength of body and soul. Take for your star self-reliance, faith, honesty and industry.

Don't take too much advice — keep at the helm and steer your own ship, and remember that the great

art of commanding is to take a fair share of the work. Fire above the mark you intend to hit. Energy,

invincible determination with the right motive, are the levers that move the world.

Noah Porter

If your actions inspire others to dream more,learn more, do more and become more,

you are a leader. John Quincy Adams

He who has never learned to obeycannot be a good commander.

Aristotle

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.

(from Christian Leadership World)

Any one can hold the helm when the sea is calm.Publilius Syrus

A leader is a dealer in hope.Napoleon Bonaparte

Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.

George Patton (from Big Dog's Quotes)

Where there is no vision, the people perish.Proverbs 29:18

Misfortunes, untoward events, lay open, disclose the skill of a general, while success conceals his

weakness, his weak points.Horace

In this world a man must either be an anvil or hammer.

Henry W. Longfellow

I light my candle from their torches.

Robert Burton

Leadership does not always wear the harness of compromise.

Woodrow Wilson

The greater a man is in power above others, the more he ought to excel them in virtue. None ought

to govern who is not better than the governed.Publius Syrus

A bold onset is half the battle.Giuseppe Garibaldi

The power is detested, and miserable the life, of him who wishes to be feared rather than to be loved.

Cornelius Nepos

To be a great leader and so always master of the situation, one must of necessity have been a great thinker in action. An eagle was never yet hatched

from a goose's egg.James Thomas

Ill can he rule the great that cannot reach the small.Edmund Spenser

He who has learned how to obey will know how to command.

Solon

When I give a minister an order, I leave it to him to find the means to carry it out.

Napoleon Bonaparte

No man can stand on top because he is put there.

H. H. Vreeland

A ruler should be slow to punish and swift to reward.Ovid

It is impossible to imagine anything which better becomes a ruler than mercy.

Seneca

No man is good enough to govern another man without that other's consent.

Abraham Lincoln

What you cannot enforce / Do not command.

Sophocles

No general can fight his battles alone. He must depend upon his lieutenants, and his success

depends upon his ability to select the right man for the right place.Philip Armour

To do great things is difficult; but to command great things is more difficult.Friedrich Nietzsche

It is absurd that a man should rule others, who cannot rule himself. (Absurdum est ut alios regat, qui

seipsum regere nescit.) Latin Proverb

Let him who would be moved to convince others, be first moved to convince himself.

Thomas Carlyle

A good general not only sees the way to victory; he also knows when victory is impossible.

Polybius We call ourselves a “capacity building” organization; self-motivated and self-initiated capacity building. For example, in 30 years, I don’t think I have signed a check for the company. Talal Abu-Ghazaleh - Employee - Motivational - Management - Companies - Leadership

I think you have to work with people, and when I talk about managing relationships, don’t think the derogatory ‘‘managed relationships’’. It is a question of sharing emotion and feelings. The common denominator of everything can’t be money, and it should not be money.Anil Ambani - Work - Management - Money - People

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 - Companies - Assets - Management

Whenever there is a hard job to be done I assign it to a lazy man; he is sure to find an easy way of doing it.Walter Chrysler - Hard Work - Lazy - Management

Smart people instinctively understand the dangers of entrusting our future to self-serving leaders who use our institutions.. whether in the corporate or social sectors.. to advance their own

interests.Jim Collins - Smart - Society - Understanding - Leadership - Management

If we allow the celebrity rock-star model of leadership to triumph, we will see the decline of corporations and institutions of all types. The twentieth century was a century of greatness, but we face the very real prospect that the next century will see very few enduring great institutions.Jim Collins - Management - Famous - Leadership - Great

I think the most important CEO task is defining the course that the business will take over the next five or so years. You have to have the ability to see what the business environment might be like a long way out, not just over the coming months. You need to be able to both set a broad direction, and also to take particular decisions along the way that make that broad direction unfold correctly.Chris Corrigan - Management - Decisions - Business - Planning - CEO

I'm a firm believer that to really understand a business takes years, not months. As an investment analyst you think you understand a business from the outside, but the reality is that, once you are inside, you can go on learning for five or ten years. Chris Corrigan - Management - Business - Investing - Learning

I was always acting primarily with shareholder interests in mind. It's also true I've always had a fairly moralistic attitude to business, and would not do anything that I considered improper.

As a consequence, I have occasionally pursued issues during my career that other people might have avoided.Chris Corrigan - Management - Stocks - Business - Challenges - Job

There are managers so preoccupied with their e-mail messages that they never look up from their screens to see what's happening in the nondigital world.Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi - Management - Internet - Technology

In knowledge-intensive business settings, where every manager has to oversee massive amounts of information as well as people, facilitating the use of psychic energy becomes a primary concern.Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi - Management - Knowledge - People

In large organizations the dilution of information as it passes up and down the hierarchy, and horizontally across departments, can undermine the effort to focus on common goals.Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi - Companies - Management - Focus - Goals

The most efficient way to produce anything is to bring together under one management as many as possible of the activities needed to turn out the product.Peter Drucker - Management

Some of the best business and nonprofit CEOs I've worked with over a sixty-five-year consulting career were not stereotypical leaders. They were all over the map in terms of their personalities, attitudes, values, strengths, and weaknesses.

Peter Drucker - Leadership - Strength - Management - CEO

Executives owe it to the organization and to their fellow workers not to tolerate nonperforming individuals in important jobs.Peter Drucker - Leadership - Responsibility - Work - Management

Checking the results of a decision against its expectations shows executives what their strengths are, where they need to improve, and where they lack knowledge or information. Peter Drucker - Leadership - Strength - Management - Decisions

Most discussions of decision making assume that only senior executives make decisions or that only senior executives' decisions matter. This is a dangerous mistake.Peter Drucker - Decisions - Mistakes - Management

Businesses are made by people. We've proven time and time again that you can have wonderful shop, and put a bloke in there who's no good, and he'll stuff it up. Put a good bloke in, and it just turns around like that.Gerry Harvey - Companies - Management - Ambition

I went to the brink many times. A couple of times I thought "I'm gone.. This is it." But then you would just keep working. I think if you're close to the brink and just make sure that you work twice as hard and put twice as much effort into everything and the people around you and everything, you should come through.Gerry Harvey - Management - Ambition - Challenges

It's not a question of arriving and putting in a whole new

administration, but instead, arriving and "compacting" things as much as possible, reducing management layers. We want as few management layers as possible, so that executives are very close to the operations. We also don't believe in having big corporate infrastructures.Carlos Slim Helu - Companies - Management - Improving

I'm going to miss Blockbuster. I'm gonna miss being CEO and all that stuff. We had an atmosphere where everybody was happy. When people make money, they're happy.Wayne Huizenga - Employee - Money - Management - Happy - CEO

Management is nothing more than motivating other people.Lee Iacocca - Management - Motivational - People

Too often it's not the most creative guys or the smartest. Instead, it's the ones who are best at playing politics and soft-soaping their bosses. Boards don't like tough, abrasive guys.Carl Icahn - Politics - Intelligent - Management

We have bloated bureaucracies in Corporate America. The root of the problem is the absence of real corporate democracy.Carl Icahn - Politics - Management - Companies - Problems

With some exceptions, the wrong people are running U.S. companies. It's been that way for years, and it hasn't gotten much better.Carl Icahn - Management - Companies - Criticism

We want these assets to be productive. We buy them. We own them. To say we care only about the short term is wrong. What I care about is seeing these assets in the best handsCarl Icahn - Assets - Management

We're not about liquidating companies, but if you do that, why is that terrible? We're not blowing up the factories. The person who buys it should be able to make the asset more productive.Carl Icahn - Management - Assets - Improvement

People ought to invest in us because they like our company and the way they run it. We still do quarterly earnings guidance, but we tell people openly that they ought to look at the company for the long term and that's how they ought to invest.Jeffrey Immelt - Companies - Future - Investing - Long Term Investing - Management - Earnings

I’m out talking about this company (General Electric) seven days a week, 24 hours a day, with nothing to hide. We’re a 130-year-old company that has a great record of high-quality leadership and a culture of integrity.Jeffrey Immelt - CEO - Companies - Leadership - Management - Integrity

The people who are doing the work are the moving force behind the Macintosh. My job is to create a space for them, to clear out the rest of the organization and keep it at bay. Steve Jobs - Work

Today, a skilled manager makes more than the owner. And

owners fight each other to get the skilled managers.Mikhail Khodorkovsky - Money - Management -

Our industry expertise (at KKR) enables the firm not only to make better investment choices but also to win the confidence of senior management and sellers, which has enabled us to purchase many companies on an exclusive basis.Henry Kravis - Companies - Buying - Selling - Experience - Decisions - Investing - Management - Confidence

We've got a portfolio of companies that range all the way from hotels to television stations and cable TV companies, oil and gas, consumer products, and industrial products. If there's anything that I want to know more about, I have the opportunity. It's right in our portfolio. I can spend time at the factory or with the manangement and learn as much as I want. You can't get bored doing that.Henry Kravis - Companies - Management - Opportunity - Learning - Bored

Go for a business that any idiot can run - because sooner or later, any idiot probably is going to run it.Peter Lynch - Management - Business - Investing -

I think the hardest thing about my job is the way Whole Foods Market views itself philosophically is that we are a business dedicated to meeting all the various stakeholders of the company's best interests. And by stakeholders we mean customers, team members, stockholders, community, and the environment. Sometimes what is in the best interest of one

stakeholder may not be in the best interest of another stakeholder, and as the CEO, I have to balance the various interests of the different constituencies and stakeholders to create win, win, win scenarios, and that can sometimes be very difficult to do. Everybody wants something from the CEO.John Mackey - Stocks - Customers - Business Ethics - Management - Environmental - Challenges - Companies - CEO

Synergies are something that the CEO basically has to force to happen, because organizations are, generally, like bodies in motion that tend to stay in motion. It's very hard to get big organizations to change. And it takes really a very powerful mandate to force things to happen.John Malone - Management - Change - Power - CEO

I have learned the novice can often see things that the expert overlooks. All that is necessary is not to be afraid of making mistakes, or of appearing naive.Abraham Maslow - Management - Learning - Fear - Mistakes - Encouragement

Regardless of how well a studio is run, it's only as good as the product it produces.Vince McMahon - Business - Management - Products

In financing growing companies, we always looked for human value that didn’t appear on the balance sheet.. the quality of management, especially its entrepreneurial drive.Michael Milken - Investing - Companies - Employee - Management - Entrepreneurs

A boat can't have two captains.Akira Mori - Management

I believe my concepts are more than just business, they are about our culture.Minoru Mori - Management - Business - Belief - Culture

We intend to conduct our business in a way that not only meets but exceeds the expectations of our customers, business partners, shareholders, and creditors, as well as the communities in which we operate and society at large.Akira Mori - Management - Business - Customers - Society - Partnership - Stocks

Understanding how to be a good investor makes you a better business manager and vice versa.Charlie Munger - Management - Investing - Understanding

You can't build a strong corporation with a lot of committees and a board that has to be consulted every turn. You have to be able to make decisions on your own.Rupert Murdoch - Strength - Decisions - Management

The buck stops with me, but I can tick off dozens of very good senior executives that are responsible for hundreds or thousands of people who work for me. Rupert Murdoch - Management - Responsibility - Employee - Leadership

If the boss is a jerk, get over it. First of all, don’t you think there’s a good chance that your boss’s boss knows what’s going on? If so, just keep your head down and do the work. Usually, if you put in maximum effort and produce excellent results, someone in the company is going to take notice. Either you will get promoted or your jerky boss will get the heave-ho. It happens all the time.Suze Orman - Jobs - Management - Hard Work - Companies

We don't have as many managers as we should, but we would rather have too few than too many.Larry Page - Management

Successful enterprises are usually led by a proven chief executive who is a competent benevolent dictator.Richard Pratt - Companies - Leadership - Management

Good management consists in showing average people how to do the work of superior people. John D. Rockefeller - Management - Work - Leadership

I'm able to bring business expertise but, more importantly, operating experience. The people here at Google are young. Every day there are lots of new challenges. I keep things focused. The speech I give everyday is: "This is what we do. Is what you are doing consistent with that, and does it change the world?"Eric Schmidt - Internet - Management - Change - Focus

Our mission statement about treating people with respect and dignity is not just words but a creed we live by every day. You can't expect your employees to exceed the expectations of your

customers if you don't exceed the employees' expectations of management.Howard Schultz - Respect - Employee - Customers - Management - Encouragement

Hiring people is an art, not a science, and resumes can't tell you whether someone will fit into a company's culture. When you realize you've made a mistake, you need to cut your losses and move on.Howard Schultz - Employee - Management - Jobs - Decisions - Art - Companies - Culture - Mistakes

I have yet to find the man, however exalted his station, who did not do better work and put forth greater effort under a spirit of approval than under a spirit of criticism.Charles Schwab - Leadership - Work

Practice Golden-Rule 1 of Management in everything you do. Manage others the way you would like to be managed.Brian Tracy - Management

I mean, there's no arguing. There is no anything. There is no beating around the bush. "You're fired" is a very strong term.Donald Trump - Management

Well, yes, I've fired a lot of people. Generally I like other people to fire, because it's always a lousy task. But I have fired many people.Donald Trump - Management - Work

If words of command are not clear and distinct, if orders are not thoroughly understood, the general is to blame. But if his orders are clear, and the soldiers nevertheless disobey, then it is the fault of their officers.Sun Tzu - Leadership - Management - Blame - Understanding - Soldier - Fault

My main job was developing talent. I was a gardener providing water and other nourishment to our top 750 people. Of course, I had to pull out some weeds, too.Jack Welch - Management

People ask me, how is managing in the New Economy different from managing in the Old Economy? Actually, it's a lot the same. It's about the financial discipline of the bottom line, understanding your customers, segmenting your customers by their needs, and building a world-class management team.Meg Whitman - Ebay - Companies - Management - Economy - Customers - Customer Service - Finance

Some great people are leaders and others are more lucky, in the right place at the right time. I'd put myself in the latter category. But I'd never call myself a normal designer of anything.Steve Wozniak - Great - Luck - Leadership - Management

The way you see them is the way you treat them and the way you treat them is the way they often become.Zig Ziglar - Management - Attitude

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 - Business - Customers - Management - Opportunity