Top 32 Quotes Every Entrepreneur Should Live By

by Tanya Prive, Contributor Forbes (I had fun putting pictures to names!!)

The nature of being an entrepreneur means that you fully embrace ambiguity and are comfortable with being challenged regularly. 

Choosing this career path is completely irrational because the odds of succeeding are dismal, but most succeed because of their unwavering belief, laser focus on delivering and persistence.

Starting a company is a riveting roller coaster of emotions with tremendous highs and at times, difficult lows, but one thing that always helps me through the ups and downs is to connect with some of the greatest minds. Below are just a few of my favourite quotes:

1. “The best way to predict the future is to create it.”
- Peter Drucker

2. “Winners never quit and quitters never win.”
3. “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

4. “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

5. “My biggest motivation? Just to keep challenging myself. I see life almost like one long University education that I never had — everyday I’m learning something new.”
- Richard Branson

6. “Every time you state what you want or believe, you’re the first to hear it. It’s a message to both you and others about what you think is possible. Don’t put a ceiling on yourself.”
- Oprah Winfrey

7. “It’s fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.”

 8.“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”
- Bill Gates

9. “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.” 
- Warren Buffett 

10. “One of the huge mistakes people make is that they try to force an interest on themselves. You don’t choose your passions; your passions choose you.”
- Jeff Bezos

11. “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
12. ”Genius is 1% inspiration, and 99% perspiration.”
- Thomas Edison

13. “Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.”
- Albert Einstein

14. “As long as you’re going to be thinking anyway, think big.”
- Donald Trump

15. “Success is walking from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.”
- Winston Churchill

16. “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbour. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”

17. “Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.”- Mark Twain

18. “If you cannot do great things, do small things in a great way.”

19. “Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, the mind can achieve.”

- Napoleon Hill

20. “I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.”
- Bill Cosby

21. “Success is not what you have, but who you are.”

- Bo Bennet

22. “Entrepreneurship is living a few years of your life like most people won’t so you can spend the rest of your life like most people cant.”

- Warren G. Tracy’s student

23. “To win without risk is to triumph without glory.”
- Corneille

24. “There is only one success- to be able to spend your life in your own way.”
- Christopher Morley

25. “Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.”
- Albert Schweitzer

26. “What is not started will never get finished”
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

27. “When you cease to dream you cease to live.”
- Malcolm Forbes

28. “Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune.”
- Jim Rohn

29. “The most valuable thing you can make is a mistake- you can’t learn anything from being perfect.”
- Adam Osborne

30. “A leader is one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way.”
- John C. Maxwell

31. “The function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers.”
- Ralph Nader

32. “Choose a job that you like, and you will never have to work a day in your life.”
- Confucius

What are some of your classic quotes?