The following is a list of motivational business quotes that include topics on goals, success, and sales/customer service. To achieve a worthy goal, whether it’s in business or in your personal life, perseverance and determination is needed preceded and followed by tons of action. It also takes the correct strategies and the wisdom to know what to focus your efforts on especially in the business world where the playing field and even the rules can change in a blink of an eye. The ability to change and adapt in order to stay ahead of the competition can be both exhilarating and stressful but that’s the nature of pursuing an exciting business goal. All of this is a whole lot easier if you’re in a business/career that you actually enjoy and love.
Whatever business you’re in, whatever your current goals and dreams are, I hope one of more of these quotes will assist you in getting through the down times as well as helping you to keep your focus during the good times.
1. “Do what you love to do and give it your very best. Whether it’s business or baseball, or the theater, or any field. If you don’t love what you’re doing and you can’t give it your best, get out of it. Life is too short. You’ll be an old man before you know it.”
Al Lopez
2. “When it is obvious that the goals cannot be reach, don’t adjust the goals; adjust the action steps.”
Confucius
3. “In the end, all business operations can be reduced to three words: people, product and profits. Unless you’ve got a good team, you can’t do much with the other two.”
Lee Iacocca
4. “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
5. “If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.”
John Quincy Adams
6. “Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.”
Henry Ford
7. “All lasting business is built on friendship.”
Alfred A. Montapert
8. “High sentiments always win in the end. The leaders who offer blood, toil, tears and sweat always get more out of their followers than those who offer safety and a good time. When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic.”
George Orwell
9. “Leaders who win the respect of others are the ones who deliver more than they promise, not the ones who promise more than they can deliver.”
Mark A. Clement
10. “Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishment.”
Jim Rohn
11. “Our goals can only be reached through a vehicle of a plan, in which we must vigorously act. There is no other route to success.”
Stephen A. Brennan
12. “Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion.”
Jack Welch
13. “Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.”
Peter F. Drucker
14. “Never follow your dreams. Follow your effort. It’s not about what you can dream of. That’s easy. It’s about whether or not it’s important enough to you to do the work to be ready to be successful in that business.”
Mark Cuban
15. “During a negotiation, it would be wise not to take anything personally. If you leave personalities out of it, you will be able to see opportunities more objectively.”
Brian Koslow
16. “We are built to conquer environment, solve problems, achieve goals, and we find no real satisfaction or happiness in life without obstacles to conquer and goals to achieve.”
Maxwell Maltz
17. “Every sale has five basic obstacles: no need, no money, no hurry, no desire, no trust.”
Zig Ziglar
18. “A project is complete when it starts working for you, rather than you working for it.”
Scott Allen
19. “If you want to be successful in a particular field or endeavor, I think perseverance is one of the key qualities. It’s very important that you find something that you care about, that you have a deep passion for, because you’re going to have to devote a lot of your life to it.”
George Lucas
20. “A business absolutely devoted to service will have only one worry about profits. They will be embarrassingly large.”
Henry Ford
21. “A satisfied customer is the best business strategy of all.”
Michael Leboeuf
22. “Your ability to communicate is an important tool in your pursuit of your goals, whether it is with your family, your co-workers, or your clients and customers.”
Les Brown
23. “Expect the best. Prepare for the worst. Capitalize on what comes.”
Zig Ziglar
24. “What chance gathers, she easily scatters. A great person attracts great people and knows how to hold them together.”
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
25. “No man can stand on top because he is put there.”
H. H. Vreeland
26. “You must never try to make all the money that’s in a deal. Let the other fellow make some money too, because if you have a reputation for always making all the money, you won’t have many deals.”
J. Paul Getty
27. “If you are planning on doing business with someone again, don’t be too tough in the negotiations. If you’re going to skin a cat, don’t keep it as a house cat.”
Marvin Levin
28. “One of the things that may get in the way of people … is that they’re not in touch with their passion. If you’re passionate about what it is you do, then you’re going to be looking for everything you can to get better at it.”
Jack Canfield
29. “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”
Winston Churchill
30. “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”
Steve Jobs
31. “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
32. “Business opportunities are like buses, there’s always another one coming.”
Richard Branson
33. “A man should never neglect his family for business.”
Walt Disney
34. “Many are stubborn in pursuit of the path they have chosen, few in pursuit of the goal.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
35. “I like thinking big. If you’re going to be thinking anything, you might as well think big.”
Donald Trump
36. “Chase your passion, not your pension.”
Denis Waitley
37. “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
38. “Yesterday’s home runs don’t win today’s games.”
Babe Ruth
39. “Leadership is a potent combination of strategy and character. But if you must be without one, be without the strategy.”
Norman Schwarzkopf
40. “This is a classic negotiation technique. It’s a gentle, soft indication of your disapproval and a great way to keep negotiating. Count to 10. By then, the other person usually will start talking and may very well make a higher offer.”
Bill Coleman
41. “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.
42. “A business has to be involving, it has to be fun, and it has to exercise your creative instincts.”
Richard Branson
43. “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”
Bill Gates
44. “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
45. “Management is nothing more than motivating other people.”
Le Iacocca
46. “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
47. “Leadership is doing what is right when no one is watching.”
George Van Valkenburg
48. “Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.”
Dwight Eisenhower
49. “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
50. “The golden rule for every business man is this: “Put yourself in your customer’s place.”
Orison Swett Marden
51. “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
52. “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
53. “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
54. “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
55. “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
56. “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
57. “In the business world, everyone is paid in two coins: cash and experience. Take the experience first; the cash will come later.”
Harold Geneen
58. “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
59. “The absolute fundamental aim is to make money out of satisfying customers.”
John Egan
60. “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
61. “It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”
Charles Darwin
62. “Hire character. Train skill.”
Peter Schutz
63. “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
64. “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
65. “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
66. “The entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity.”
Peter F. Drucker
67. “Learn to listen. Opportunity could be knocking at your door very softly.”
Frank Tyger
68. “Your time is precious so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.”
Steve Jobs
69. “Somebody once said that in looking for people to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. And if they don’t have the first, the other two will kill you.”
Warren Buffet
70. “Out there in some garage is an entrepreneur who’s forging a bullet with your company’s name on it.”
Gary Hamel
71. “When you compete with a person, you only have to be as good or better than the person to win. If you compete with yourself, there is no limitation to how good you can be.”
Chu Chin-Ning
72. “Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”
Thomas Edison
73. “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”
Peter Drucker
74. “Not doing more than the average is what keeps the average down.”
William Lyon Phelps
75. “I cannot give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure, which is: Try to please everybody.”
Herbert B. Swope
76. “When cost is number one in importance, you’ve already lost.”
Jim Rembach
77. “Individuals and organizations that are good react quickly to change. Individuals and organizations that are great create change.”
Robert Kriegel
Finally, a video for the entrepreneurs out there:
Please sign me up to get motivation , business , etc. quotes emailed to me everyday . Or how do I sign up to get them?
Hi Debbie,
I don’t currently have a newsletter but you can get daily quotes from either my Facebook page or Twitter. You don’t need accounts on those sites to see the quotes.
I like those quotes
wonderfully selected….those quotes makes each of my days.