A good quote can motivate, inspire and uplift you. When the going gets tough and you’re struggling to figure out your next move, powerful words from someone who has trodden the entrepreneurial path, can help fuel the fire within for another day.
In that spirit, here are 101 motivational business quotes on entrepreneurship, innovation, marketing, finance, success and more. This collection of quotes from some of the greatest business minds will give you a significant boost whenever you need it.
Quotes on entrepreneurship
“Start before you’re ready.” – Steven Pressfield
“Dream big, start small, but most of all, start.” – Simon Sinek
“The way to get started is to quite talking and begin doing.” – Walt Disney
“If you’re trying to create a company, it’s like baking a cake. You have to have all the ingredients in the right proportion.” – Elon Musk
“Have the ned in mind, and every day make sure you’re working towards it.” – Ryan Allis
“You can’t build a reputation on what you’re going to do.” – Henry Ford
“As long as you’re going to be thinking anyway, think big.” – Donald Trump
“Everyone has an idea, but it’s really about executing the idea and attracting other people to help you with the idea.” – Jack Dorsey
“Whatever you do, be different – that was the advice my mother gave me, and I can’t think of better advice for an entrepreneur. If you’re different, you will stand out.” – Anita Roddick
“If you do the things that are easier first, then you can actually make a lot of progress.” – Mark Zuckerberg
Quotes on innovation
“The best way to predict the future is to create it.” – Alan Kay
“Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things.” – Theodore Levitt
“You have to not have the same bag of experiences as everyone else does, or else you’re gonna make the same connections and you won’t be innovative.” – Steve Jobs
“Swipe from the best, then adapt.” – Tom Peters
“Exploration is the engine that drives innovation. Innovation drives economic growth.” – Edith Widder
“Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.” – Steve Jobs
“I believe you have to be willing to be misunderstood if you’re going to innovate.” – Jeff Bezos
“There is no innovation and creativity without failure. Period.” – Brené Brown
“You can’t allow tradition to get in the way of innovation. There’s a need to respect the past, but it’s a mistake to revere your past.” – Bob Iger
“Innovation leads to prosperity and prosperity leads to peace.” – Jack Ma
Quotes on product design
“Good design is good business” – Paul Rand
“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” – Steve Jobs
“Make your product easy to understand and it will sell itself.” – John E. Smoll
“Great design will not sell and inferior product, but it will enable a great product to achieve its maximum potential.” – Thomas Watson Jr.
“A good product isn’t just a collection of features. It’s how it all works together.” – Tim Cook
“Simplicity is somehow essentially describing the purpose and place of an object and product.” – Jonathan Ive
“There’s a big difference between making a simple product and making a product simple.” – Des Traynor
“As far as the customer is concerned, the interface is the product.” – Jef Raskin
“Design can be art. Design can be aesthetics. Design is so simple, that’s why it is so complicated.” – Paul Rand
“Far too few designers put any thought into usability, ending up with a great product that’s completely inaccessible.” – James Dyson
Quotes on marketing
“Stop selling. Start helping.” – Zig Ziglar
“Marketing is all about creating a sense of desire.” – David Ogilvy
“Marketing is no longer about the stuff that you make, but about the stories you tell.” – Seth Godin
“The best marketing is word-of-mouth marketing.” – Jeff Bezos
“Our jobs as marketers are to understand how the customer wants to buy and help them do so.” – Bryan Eisenberg
“Stopping advertising to save money is like stopping your watch to save time.” – Henry Ford
“Make your marketing so useful people would pay you for it.” – Jay Baer
“People don’t believe what you tell them. They rarely believe what you show them. They often believe what their friends tell them. They always believe what they tell themselves.” – Seth Godin
“If you are lucky enough to write a good advertisement, repeat it until it stops selling.” – David Ogilvy
“Marketing is about values. It’s a complicated and noisy world, and we’re not going to get a chance to get people to remember much about us. No company is. So we have to be really clear about what we want them to know about us.” – Steve Jobs
Quotes on management
“What’s measured improves.” – Peter Drucker
“The strength of the team is each individual member. The strength of each member is the team.” – Phil Jackson
“The first rule of management is delegation. Don’t try and do everything yourself because you can’t.” – Anthea Turner
“No matter how brilliant your mind or strategy, if you’re playing a solo game, you’ll always lose out to a team.” – Reid Hoffman
“Success in management requires learning as fast as the world is changing.” – Warren Bennis
“The best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good men to do what he wants done, and self-restraint to keep from meddling with them while they do it.” – Theodore Roosevelt
“Many people don’t focus enough on execution. If you make a commitment to get something done, you need to follow through on that commitment.” – Kenneth Chenault
“Good management consists in showing average people how to do the work of superior people.” – John D. Rockefeller
“Management is the opportunity to help people become better people. Practiced that way, it’s a magnificent profession.” – Clayton Christenson
“Corporate culture matters. How management chooses to treat its people impacts everything – for better or for worse.” – Simon Sinek
Quotes on leadership
“A leader is one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way.” – John C. Maxwell
“The function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers.” – Ralph Nader
“Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality.” – Warren Bennis
“If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.” – John Quincy Adams
“The key to successful leadership today is influence, not authority.” – Ken Blanchard
“Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision and relentlessly drive it to completion.” – Jack Welch
“True Leadership stems from individuality that is honestly and sometimes imperfectly expressed…Leaders should strive for authenticity over perfection.” – Sheryl Sandberg
“A good leader inspires people to have confidence in the leader; a great leader inspires people to have confidence in themselves.” – Eleanor Roosevelt
“Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.” – Peter F. Drucker
“A leader is best when people barely know he exists. When his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.” – Lao Tzu
Quotes on failure and resilience
“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” – Thomas Edison
“Do not be embarrassed by your failures, learn from them and start again.” – Richard Branson
“I knew that if I failed I wouldn’t regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not trying.” – Jeff Bezos
“Mistakes are the portal of discovery” – James Joyce
“Failure is the opportunity to begin again, more intelligently.” – Henry Ford
“When things get hard (which they will), your WHY needs to be strong enough to keep you going.” – Ali Bonar
“The most important thing to do if you find yourself in a hole is to stop digging.” – Warren Buffett
“When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it.” – Henry Ford
“I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.” – Steve Jobs
“Success is most often achieved by those who don’t know that failure is inevitable.” – Coco Chanel
Quotes on finance and money
“If you would be wealthy, think of saving as well as getting.” – Benjamin Franklin
“Do not save what is left after spending; instead spend what is left after saving.” – Warren Buffett
”Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me. Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful, that’s what matters to me.” – Steve Jobs.
“Money grows on the tree of persistence.” – Japanese proverb
“Rule No. 1 is never lose money. Rule No. 2 is never forget Rule No. 1.” – Warren Buffett
“Being rich is having money; being wealthy is having time.” – Margaret Bonanno
“Time well-spent results in more money to spend, more money to save, and more time to vacation.” – Zig Ziglar
“Time is more value than money. You can get more money, but you cannot get more time.” – Jim Rohn
“If we command our wealth, we shall be rich and free. If our wealth commands us, we are poor indeed.” – Edmund Burke
“It’s not how much money you make, but how much money you keep, how hard it works for you, and how many generations you keep it for.” – Robert Kiyosaki
Quotes on business success
“Play by the rules, but be ferocious.” – Phil Knight
“To win big, you sometimes have to take big risks.” – Bill Gates
“The successful man will profit from his mistakes and try again in a different way.” – Dale Carnegie
“I never dreamed about success. I worked for it.” – Estée Lauder
“You don’t need to be a genius or a visionary or even a college graduate to be successful. You just need a framework and a dream.” – Michael Dell
“The price of success is hard work, dedication to the job at hand, and the determination that whether we win or lose, we have applied the best of ourselves to the task at hand.” – Vince Lombardi
“Success is not final; failure is not fatal: It is the courage to continue that counts.” – Winston Churchill
“The only place success comes before work is in the dictionary.” – Vidal Sassoon
“Success seems to be connected with action. Successful people keep moving. They make mistakes, but they don’t quit.” – Conrad Hilton
“If you cannot do great things, do small things in a great way.” – Napoleon Hill