If you don’t understand the details of your business you are going to fail.

To understand Europe, you have to be a genius – or French.

I firmly believe that unless one has tasted the bitter pill of failure, one cannot aspire enough for success.

What one has to do usually can be done.

A business has to be involving, it has to be fun, and it has to exercise your creative instincts.

Everything I have, my career, my success, my family, I owe to America.

Those who dare to fail miserably can achieve greatly.

As your career grows, the list of things that makes you happy should not become smaller, it should become bigger.

You’re always learning. The problem is, sometimes you stop and think you understand the world. This is not correct. The world is always moving. You never reach the point you can stop making an effort.

The business aspect is one of the most important things about having a music career, because every choice you make in a management meeting affects your life a year-and-a-half from now.

If someone has a really great boyfriend or career, I think, it’s cool that happens.

Management is efficiency in climbing the ladder of success; leadership determines whether the ladder is leaning against the right wall.

Prospering just doesn’t have to do with money.

Success is not greedy, as people think, but insignificant. That is why it satisfies nobody.

Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.

If you have an enemy, then learn and know your enemy, don’t just be mad at him or her.

The most important single ingredient in the formula of success is knowing how to get along with people.

Outsourcing is inevitable, and I don’t think it’s necessarily treating people like things.

I want to be part of that long list who have achieved great things with McLaren, won races and championships.

I have a collective sense of suffering.

From my very first day as an entrepreneur, I’ve felt the only mission worth pursuing in business is to make people’s lives better.

Being second is to be the first of the ones who lose.

Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.

Egos are never nice. I have been a victim of it a lot of times in my career. Whenever I have used it, I have failed.

A man cannot be said to succeed in this life who does not satisfy one friend.

My parents shared not only an improbable love, they shared an abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation. They would give me an African name, Barack, or blessed, believing that in a tolerant America your name is no barrier to success.

The fact that you are willing to say, ‚I do not understand, and it is fine,‘ is the greatest understanding you could exhibit.

No law or ordinance is mightier than understanding.

Faith must trample under foot all reason, sense, and understanding.

The less you know, the more you believe.

Modern poets talk against business, poor things, but all of us write for money. Beginners are subjected to trial by market.

Many a doctrine is like a window pane. We see truth through it but it divides us from truth.

What I have in common with the character in ‚Truman‘ is this incredible need to please people. I feel like I want to take care of everyone and I also feel this terrible guilt if I am unable to. And I have felt this way ever since all this success started.

The evil that is in the world almost always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding.

I’ve never met a genius. A genius to me is someone who does well at something he hates. Anybody can do well at something he loves – it’s just a question of finding the subject.

The topic of leadership is a touchy one. A lot of leaders fail because they don’t have the bravery to touch that nerve or strike that chord. Throughout my years, I haven’t had that fear.

Opera happens because a large number of things amazingly fail to go wrong.

Well, in order for me to be successful… In order to be a great artist – musician, actor, painter, whatever – you must be able to be private in public at all times.

Fame itself… doesn’t really afford you anything more than a good seat in a restaurant.

Of course awards matter.

I’m definitely gaining new fans, and that’s the key of any success… gain more love.

If something’s important enough, you should try. Even if – the probable outcome is failure.

What is easy is seldom excellent.

I used to feel unsafe right in the moment of an accomplishment – I felt the ground fall from under my feet because this could be the end. And even now, while everyone is celebrating, I’m on to the next thing. I don’t want to get lost in this big cushion of success.

I do not have much patience with a thing of beauty that must be explained to be understood. If it does need additional interpretation by someone other than the creator, then I question whether it has fulfilled its purpose.

A man never tells you anything until you contradict him.

Success or failure depends more upon attitude than upon capacity successful men act as though they have accomplished or are enjoying something. Soon it becomes a reality. Act, look, feel successful, conduct yourself accordingly, and you will be amazed at the positive results.

In inner-city, low-income communities of color, there’s such a high correlation in terms of educational quality and success.

And winning is a huge thing for me.

Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.

Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory it too good.

Irrespective of whether you have talent or not, one has to work hard. Just being talented doesn’t mean anything; you can end up wasting it before you realize.

Celebrity is the chastisement of merit and the punishment of talent.

Ability is what you’re capable of doing. Motivation determines what you do. Attitude determines how well you do it.

Hanging out with politicians and corporations is very unhip work. But I think that the U2 audience have turned out to be incredibly subtle in their understanding.

Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.

No man has a good enough memory to be a successful liar.

No man who is occupied in doing a very difficult thing, and doing it very well, ever loses his self-respect.

Football is a team game and none can survive or excel without the help of the other.

Success comes to those who have an entire mountain of gold that they continually mine, not those who find one nugget and try to live on it for fifty years.

Business is never so healthy as when, like a chicken, it must do a certain amount of scratching around for what it gets.