It’s much easier to be successful than it is to be relevant. The tricks won’t keep you relevant. Tricks might keep you popular for a while, but in all honesty, I don’t know how U2 will stay relevant. I know we’ve got a future. I know we can fill stadiums. And yet with every record, I think, ‚Is this it? Are we still relevant?‘

The wage for most musicians is a modest amount, and that includes me some of the time.

Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings.

Give a boy address and accomplishments and you give him the mastery of palaces and fortunes where he goes.

The boy who is going to make a great man must not make up his mind merely to overcome a thousand obstacles, but to win in spite of a thousand repulses and defeats.

Competitions are a business, first and foremost.

The child who desires education will be bettered by it; the child who dislikes it disgraced.

If you want to shine like a sun, first burn like a sun.

Ambition is pitiless. Any merit that it cannot use it finds despicable.

Successful people make money. It’s not that people who make money become successful, but that successful people attract money. They bring success to what they do.

We can fear things into existence. Fear looks into the future and imagines the worst that can happen.

The future influences the present just as much as the past.

Money won’t create success, the freedom to make it will.

We should measure welfare’s success by how many people leave welfare, not by how many are added.

Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must first be overcome.

I love it when people say things to me in public and want to meet me, because I want to meet them! Early on, my manager told me, ‚If you want to sell 500,000 records, then go out there and meet 500,000 people.‘

Keep your eyes on the stars, and your feet on the ground.

I bought a company in the mid-’90s called Dexter Shoe and paid $400 million for it. And it went to zero. And I gave about $400 million worth of Berkshire stock, which is probably now worth $400 billion. But I’ve made lots of dumb decisions. That’s part of the game.

I have a good team. It’s good to have a good team.

Most people have the opportunity of a lifetime flash right in front of them, and they fail to see it. A year later, they find out about it, after everyone else got rich.

I wanted to sell a million records, and I sold a million records. I wanted to go platinum; I went platinum. I’ve been working nonstop since I was 15. I don’t even know how to chill out.

I’m not a fortune-teller.

Every successful businessman will have experienced set-backs and failures – they’re lying if they say they haven’t. Virgin has had some tremendously successful businesses and some that have not quite worked out. Virgin Cola springs to mind – the product wasn’t distinct enough from Coca-Cola.

Everybody that’s successful lays a blueprint out.

I used to get the feeling, and sometimes I still get it, that sometimes I was fooling somebody; I don’t know who or what, maybe myself.

If you only believe that you’re an artist when you have a big advance in your pocket and a single coming out, I would say that’s quite soulless. You have to have a sense of your own greatness and your own ability from a very deep place inside you. I am the one with the litmus test in my hands of what people need to hear next.

I think most of the people involved in any art always secretly wonder whether they are really there because they’re good or there because they’re lucky.

At first, I was called a quack, a charlatan, and worse, year after year, in Australia, England and the United States, by men who simply refused to believe that a nurse from ‚the bush‘ could devise a treatment which succeeded where they had failed.

Music will never go away, and I will never stop making music; it’s just what capacity or what arena you decide to do it.

By prevailing over all obstacles and distractions, one may unfailingly arrive at his chosen goal or destination.

Creativity is the key to success in the future, and primary education is where teachers can bring creativity in children at that level.

Men weren’t always happy for me. It was very challenging to watch a woman be so successful.

If you get to my age in life and nobody thinks well of you, I don’t care how big your bank account is, your life is a disaster.

It’s rule number one, really – beating your teammate.

A passionate belief in your business and personal objectives can make all the difference between success and failure. If you aren’t proud of what you’re doing, why should anybody else be?

This industry has been really good to me. It’s been a great life. I’m not through yet. I’m ready when you are, Mr. DeMille.

For 25 years countless people have come to the U.N. climate conferences begging our world leaders to stop emissions and clearly that has not worked as emissions are continuing to rise. So I will not beg the world leaders to care for our future. I will instead let them know change is coming whether they like it or not.

God is more interested in your future and your relationships than you are.

If a man can… make a better mousetrap, the world will make a beaten path to his door.

Discipline is the soul of an army. It makes small numbers formidable; procures success to the weak, and esteem to all.

I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true. I am not bound to succeed, but I am bound to live by the light that I have. I must stand with anybody that stands right, and stand with him while he is right, and part with him when he goes wrong.

I can’t keep somebody from being a star, and I can’t make somebody a star, and nobody can.

As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.

If you find it in your heart to care for somebody else, you will have succeeded.

Think and grow rich.

Partnering with Atlantic Records creates the opportunity to take what we’re doing to the next level, without compromising.

The year 2100 will see eugenics universally established. In past ages, the law governing the survival of the fittest roughly weeded out the less desirable strains. Then man’s new sense of pity began to interfere with the ruthless workings of nature. As a result, we continue to keep alive and to breed the unfit.

I don’t know who I touch and who I don’t. I work hard trying to make people laugh. I try to do the kind of stuff that made me laugh growing up. I don’t have any secrets. I don’t know the reasons I’ve been so well received.

Say there’s a white kid who lives in a nice home, goes to an all-white school, and is pretty much having everything handed to him on a platter – for him to pick up a rap tape is incredible to me, because what that’s saying is that he’s living a fantasy life of rebellion.

I’ve accomplished enough with the music that I haven’t had to go out there and do other things to over-saturate.

‚Soul Plane‘ put me in a position to succeed. I’m glad I had the opportunity to be the lead man.

Part of the issue of achievement is to be able to set realistic goals, but that’s one of the hardest things to do because you don’t always know exactly where you’re going, and you shouldn’t.

My understanding of racial discrimination as a child was highly distorted because the most prominent man in Archery was an African-American bishop. When he came home from up north, where he was in charge of A.M.E. churches in five states, it was front-page news. He was the most successful man in my life.

I’ve never wanted to use my age as a gimmick, as something that would get me ahead of other people. I’ve wanted the music to do that.

I think music is something that can, and should, be used to get you into different things because eventually what goes up must come down – we’re not going to be the number one group in the world forever – so you have to have something else to fall back on.

Like so many American families, our families weren’t asking for much. They didn’t begrudge anyone else’s success or care that others had much more than they did… in fact, they admired it.

America is another name for opportunity.

There is little success where there is little laughter.

Well I think any author or musician is anxious to have legitimate sales of their products, partly so they’re rewarded for their success, partly so they can go on and do new things.

Thanks to my fans that have been with me from the beginning, I was able to sell out arenas on my own.

I think if I keep working in the way that I am, from the heart and from passion and with love, well, the fruits of that will keep coming.