Business Quotes
A business is a machine that converts inputs into outputs someone values more than the inputs cost. Everything else—mission statements, culture, innovation—is secondary to this fundamental exchange: can you create and capture enough value that the machine sustains itself? Most businesses fail not because the founders lacked passion or worked insufficiently hard but because they built something nobody wanted badly enough to pay for. This is the brutal reality of markets: your opinion about your product's value doesn't matter. Only customer behavior matters. And customers vote with their wallets, not their words. They'll tell you your idea is great, they'd totally use it, it solves a real problem for them—then not buy when you launch.
"A sunny disposition is worth more than fortune. Young people should know that it can be cultivated."
"Learning is a lifelong process."
"The leading rule for the lawyer, as for the man of every other calling, is diligence. Leave nothing for to-morrow which can be done to-day. Never let your correspondence fall behind. Whatever piece of business you have in hand, before stopping, do all the labor pertaining to it which can then be done. Fragment, Notes for a Law Lecture (1 July 1850), cited in Abraham Lincoln: Complete Works, Comprising his Speeches, Letters, State Papers, and Miscellaneous Writings, Vol. 2 (1894)"
"It's far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price."
"Heaven cannot brook two suns, nor earth two masters."
"Finding a good deal, the right business, the right people, the right investors, or whatever is just like dating. You must go to the market and talk to a lot of people, make a lot of offers, counteroffers, negotiate, reject and accept."
Website: Wikiquote - Robert Kiyosaki (Rich Dad Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money-That the Poor and the Middle Class Do Not!)
"Seek wealth, not money or status. Wealth is having assets that earn while you sleep. Money is how we transfer time and wealth. Status is your place in the social hierarchy."
"Business opportunities are like buses, there’s always another one coming."
"The most important thing that entrepreneurs should do is pick something they care about, work on it, but don't actually commit to making it a company until it actually works."
"Imagination rules the world."
"The first requisite of a good citizen in this Republic of ours is that he shall be able and willing to pull his weight."
"Build me a son, O Lord, who will be strong enough to know when he is weak, and brave enough to face himself when he is afraid."
"Most people are not used to an environment where they have to excel."
"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."
"The purpose of a business is to create a customer."
"To be a professional is to be reliable. To be an entrepreneur is to be antifragile."
"Do your damnedest in an ostentatious manner all the time."
"The biggest secret in venture capital is that the best investment in a successful fund equals or outperforms the entire rest of the fund combined."
"In an idea meritocracy, the best ideas win, no matter where they come from."
"A friendship founded on business is better than a business founded on friendship."
"My life was too short to achieve the conquest of the entire world. That task is left to you."
"High-level networking isn't about what you can get, it's about what you can provide. Be valuable first."
"Strategic inflection points are not just about technology. They are about how customers want to be served."
"We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us."
"Strategic planning requires a calm mind that is not clouded by immediate greed."
"The safest way to get what you want is to deserve what you want."
"The goal is not to be perfect, the goal is to be human."
"The only way to be successful is to be obsessed."
"Attention is the only asset."
"There is a point of complexity beyond which a business is no longer manageable. p. 681"
"I would as soon leave to my son a curse as the almighty dollar."
"Every time you make a hard decision, you are building your character."
"I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis."
"You don't need to be a rocket scientist. Investing is not a game where the guy with the 160 IQ beats the guy with 130 IQ."
Why these quotes matter
Business skills matter because they determine whether your ideas become reality or remain unrealized potential. The world is full of smart people with good ideas who can't execute because they don't understand the mechanics of creating and capturing value. Understanding business doesn't make you mercenary—it makes you effective. You can have the most noble mission imaginable, but if you can't build a sustainable economic model, your impact dies when your funding runs out. Business sustainability enables everything else: the longer you survive, the more you can compound your impact. The alternative is a brief burst of activity followed by quiet failure.
How to apply them daily
Start by validating demand before building anything significant: talk to 50-100 potential customers, understand their current behavior and existing solutions, identify where they're overpaying or under-served. Only build after you've found people who will pay for your solution—not might pay, will pay. Get pre-orders or letters of intent before writing code or manufacturing product. Next, obsess over unit economics: what does it cost to acquire a customer (marketing, sales, time), what do they pay you (price), how long do they stay (retention), and what's the total value over their lifetime? If the numbers don't work, no amount of hard work fixes them. You need fundamentally different positioning, pricing, or cost structure. Also, build distribution into your product strategy from day one: the best product that nobody knows about loses to the mediocre product with distribution. How will customers discover you? What makes them talk about you? How do you reduce friction in the buying process? Finally, maintain financial discipline: default alive (cash flow positive) as quickly as possible so you're not dependent on external funding or at the mercy of investor timelines.
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"Business is not a mystery—it's a machine with understandable mechanics. Create something people value, capture enough of that value to sustain operations, improve the machine continuously. Master these basics and you transform ideas into reality. Ignore them and you waste years building things nobody wants."