No enterprise is more likely to succeed than one concealed from the enemy until it is ripe for execution.

Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.

Self-belief and hard work will always earn you success.

If everyone is moving forward together, then success takes care of itself.

Don’t confuse fame with success. Madonna is one; Helen Keller is the other.

Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time.

A lot of people think international relations is like a game of chess. But it’s not a game of chess, where people sit quietly, thinking out their strategy, taking their time between moves. It’s more like a game of billiards, with a bunch of balls clustered together.

The successful men I admired all built their bodies.

There’s many ups and downs in the fight game.

I don’t think the government should be in the trailer-park business. I don’t think they know how to run a trailer park.

I calculate that I took 20,000 punches, but I earned millions and kept a lot of it. I may talk slow, but my mind is OK.

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.

Fame and power are the objects of all men. Even their partial fruition is gained by very few; and that, too, at the expense of social pleasure, health, conscience, life.

The moment I said I’d finished a book, I knew what would happen. There would be a bidding war, and I would end up with someone who’d got the fattest wallet, who had bought it because I’d written Harry Potter. That would have been why.

The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet. The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together.

Put it this way: If I asked, ‚How’s business?‘ and you say, ‚Boomin‘ or ‚Amazing,‘ I already know the answer.

The highest reward that God gives us for good work is the ability to do better work.

If there’s one thing that’s certain in business, it’s uncertainty.

Nobody likes to fail. I want to succeed in everything I do, which isn’t much. But the things that I’m really passionate about, if I fail at those, if I’m not successful, what do I have?

To me, we’re marketing hope.

Earn your success based on service to others, not at the expense of others.

Fortune befriends the bold.

We must open the doors of opportunity. But we must also equip our people to walk through those doors.

People just don’t understand how obsessed I am with winning.

Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. In other words, it is war minus the shooting.

I think, because I started Virgin when I was a teenager, it has become a part of me, like my family, and I am motivated by ambition for it, almost as if it were a child.

Competition is the keen cutting edge of business, always shaving away at costs.

What keeps me going is goals.

That nice, soft pillow and the warm blanket, and it’s all comfortable, and no one wants to leave that comfort – but if you can wake up early in the morning, get a head start on everyone else that’s still sleeping, get productive time doing things that you need to do – that’s a huge piece to moving your life forward.

When schools flourish, all flourishes.

I think my first thought on reaching the summit- of course, I was very, very pleased to be there, naturally – but my first thought was one of a little bit of surprise. I was a little bit surprised that here I was, Ed Hillary, on top of Mt. Everest. After all, this is the ambition of most mountaineers.

My message, especially to young people is to have courage to think differently, courage to invent, to travel the unexplored path, courage to discover the impossible and to conquer the problems and succeed. These are great qualities that they must work towards. This is my message to the young people.

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

Think of yourself as on the threshold of unparalleled success. A whole, clear, glorious life lies before you. Achieve! Achieve!

Self-confidence is the first requisite to great undertakings.

Overcoming fear is the first step to success for entrepreneurs. The winners all exemplify that, and the hard work and commitment they have shown underlines what is needed to set up a business.

It is a fine game to play – the game of politics – and it is well worth waiting for a good hand before really plunging.

All achievements, all earned riches, have their beginning in an idea.

Happiness doesn’t come from being rich, nor merely from being successful in your career, nor by self-indulgence. One step towards happiness is to make yourself healthy and strong while you are a boy so that you can be useful and so you can enjoy life when you are a man.

The moment the alarm goes off is the first test; it sets the tone for the rest of the day. The test is not a complex one: when the alarm goes off, do you get up out of bed, or do you lie there in comfort and fall back to sleep? If you have the discipline to get out of bed, you win – you pass the test.

The seven-inch tablets are tweeners: too big to compete with a smartphone, and too small to compete with an iPad.

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.

For my part, I desire to see the time when education – and by its means, morality, sobriety, enterprise and industry – shall become much more general than at present, and should be gratified to have it in my power to contribute something to the advancement of any measure which might have a tendency to accelerate the happy period.

I am a lucky man. I have had a dream and it has come true, and that is not a thing that happens often to men.

I probably hold the distinction of being one movie star who, by all laws of logic, should never have made it. At each stage of my career, I lacked the experience.

The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want and if they can’t find them, make them.

I think that once you’ve had a few No. 1s in your career that you’ve kind of proven yourself, and I don’t feel the need to prove anything anymore.

Luck is a matter of preparation meeting opportunity.

The ways of the Lord are different from the ways of man. Man’s ways remove people from office or business when they grow old or become disabled. But man’s ways are not and never will be the Lord’s ways.

Take the course opposite to custom and you will almost always do well.

A great social success is a pretty girl who plays her cards as carefully as if she were plain.

My success comes in making fun of whatever you’re doing. That’s my way.

Sometimes people make it seem like you have to have certain prerequisites or a crazy life story in order to be successful in this world. But the truth is you really don’t.

When the water starts boiling it is foolish to turn off the heat.

I’m not a macroeconomics person.

I was doing sold-out shows before I got radio play.

The thing I always say to people is this: ‚If you avoid failure, you also avoid success.‘

If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.

Finding good partners is the key to success in anything: in business, in marriage and, especially, in investing.

It feels good being a restaurant owner because it’s part of my dreams of being the biggest mogul.

Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet.