50 Key Quotes From The 50 Best Business Books

Think you need an MBA from a top school to gain business smarts? Getting an MBA is an expensive choice – why fall into debts to get a degree to get a job to refund your heavy loan? Taking accountability for your education starts with understanding that even elite schools like Harvard and HEC offer outdated, assembly-line programs that teach you more about PowerPoint presentations and unnecessary financial models than about what it takes to run a real business.

They may teach you how to work for money, but not how to make money work for you. They may teach you the basics of business but not how to make a real difference. What they mostly teach you is to crave for a stamp on your forehead coming from their expensive institutions and saying “You’re capable. You’re worth it. You’re good enough.”

I’m not saying don’t get a degree. All I’m saying is, why would you need such an expensive stamp on your forehead to get started? If you are not self-confident without a degree today, you won’t be as a business owner tomorrow for you will never know everything about everything – and you don’t need to. See, we all have these primary fears that we are not good enough. But we can all change those limiting beliefs for empowering ones. It starts with understanding that we don’t need external validation. We need internal validation. So let’s make this clear: you are already good enough today; all you need is to learn how to become better tomorrow.

The good news is, they are tones of people out there who did succeed in what you aim to achieve in life and wrote about how they made it to success. Why not learn directly from them instead? Why learn from teachers who never did achieve your goals themselves? Why waste your time and money? You can get better results by learning from the best reading every day. Here’s a selection of 50 key quotes from the 50 best business books. Enjoy Winners!

1 | Think and Grow Rich | Napoleon Hill

“If you truly desire money so keenly that your desire is an obsession, you will have no difficulty in convincing yourself that you will acquire it. The object is to want money, and to be so determined to have it that you convince yourself that you will have it.”

2 | Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway | Susan Jeffers

“By reeducating the mind, you can accept fear as simply a fact of life rather than a barrier to success.”

3 | The Alchimist | Paulo Coelho

“When you really want something, the whole universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.”

4 | The Element | Ken Robinson

“We are all born with extraordinary powers of imagination, intelligence, feeling, intuition, spirituality, and of physical and sensory awareness. For the most part, we use only a fraction of these powers, and some not at all.”

5 | The Magic of Thinking Big | David J. Schwartz

“Success doesn’t demand a price. Every step forward pays a dividend.”

6 | The Last Lecture |Jeffrey Zaslow & Randy Pausch

“My uniqueness, I realized, came in the specifics of all the dreams–from incredibly meaningful to decidedly quirky–that define my 46 years of life. Sitting there, I knew that despite the cancer, I truly believed I was a lucky man because I had lived out these dreams.”

7 | Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff | Richard Carlson

“When you learn the habit of responding to life with more ease, problems that seemed ‘insurmountable’ will begin to seem more manageable.”

8 | The Power of Full Engagement | Jim Loehr & Tony Schwartz

“The performance demands that most people face in their everyday work environments dwarf those of any professional athletes we have ever trained.”

9 | Crossing the Chasm | Geoffrey Moore

“‘Why me?’ cries out the unsuccessful entrepreneur. Or rather ‘Why not me?’ ‘Why not us?’ chorus his equally unsuccessful investors. ‘Look at our product. Is it not as good–nay, better–than the product that beat us out?’…. In fact, feature for feature, the less successful product is often arguably superior.”

10 | Selling the Invisible | Harry Beckwith

“The new marketing is more than a way of doing; it is a way of thinking. It begins with an understanding of the distinctive characteristics of services–their invisibility and intangibility–and of the unique nature of service prospects and users–their fear, their limited time, their sometimes illogical ways of making decisions, and their most important drives and needs.”

Read also: Will Your New Product Idea Make Money? Check It Out Now!

11 | Influence | Robert Cialdini

“There is a group of people who know very well where the weapons of automatic influence lie and employ them regularly and expertly to get what they want. They go from social encounter to social encounter requesting others to comply with their wishes; their frequency of success is dazzling.”

12 | Positioning | Al Ries

“Positioning is not what you do to a product. Positioning is what you do to the mind of the prospect.”

13 | Buy-ology | Martin Lindstrom

“If marketers could uncover what is going on in our brains that makes us choose one brand over another–what information passes through our brain’s filter and what information doesn’t–well, that would be key to truly building brands of the future.”

14 | Permission Marketing | Seth Godin

“Marketers want to get their messages in front of you. They must get their messages in front of you, just to survive. The only problem is–do you really want more marketing messages?”

15 | Guerrilla Marketing | Jay Conrad Levinson

“Guerrilla marketing requires you to comprehend every facet of marketing, experiment with many of them, winnow out the losers, double up on the winners, and then use the marketing tactics that prove themselves to you in the battleground of real life.”

16 | The Long Tail | Chris Anderson

“As demand shifts towards the niches, the economics of providing them improve further, and so on, creating a positive feedback loop that will transform entire industries–and the culture–for decades to come.”

17 | Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds | Charles Mackay

“We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first.”

18 | The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People | Stephen Covey

“Sow a thought, reap an action; sow an action, reap a habit; sow a habit, reap a character; sow a character, reap a destiny.”

19 | How to Win Friends & Influence People | Dale Carnegie

“The unvarnished truth is that almost all the people you meet feel themselves superior to you in some way, and a sure way to their hearts is to let them realize in some subtle way that you recognize their importance, and recognize it sincerely.”

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20 | Awaken the Giant Within | Tony Robbins

“If you can’t, you must. If you must, you can.”

21 | As a Man Thinketh | James Allen

“The dreamers are the saviors of the world. As the visible world is sustained by the invisible, so men, through all their trials and sins and sordid vocations, are nourished by the beautiful visions of their solitary dreamers.”

22 | The Greatest Salesman in the World | Og Mandino

“I will live this day as if it is my last. This day is all I have and these hours are now my eternity. I greet this sunrise with cries of joy as a prisoner who is reprieved from death. I lift mine arms with thanks for this priceless gift of a new day.”

23 | The Personal MBA | Josh Kaufman

“The quickest and easiest way to screw up your life is to take on too much debt.”

24 | Drive | Daniel H. Pink

“For artists, scientists, inventors, schoolchildren, and the rest of us, intrinsic motivation–the drive to do something because it is interesting, challenging, and absorbing–is essential for high levels of creativity.”

25 | The Power of Positive Thinking | Norman Vincent Peale

“Action is a great restorer and builder of confidence. Inaction is not only the result, but the cause, of fear. Perhaps the action you take will be successful; perhaps different action or adjustments will have to follow. But any action is better than no action at all.”

26 | How to Lie With Statistics | Darrell Huff

“A well-wrapped statistic is better than Hitler’s ‘big lie’; it misleads, yet it cannot be pinned on you.”

27 | The No Asshole Rule | Robert I. Sutton

“Two-faced backstabbers… who have enough skill and emotional control to save their dirty work for moments when they can’t get caught, are tougher to stop–even though they may do as much damage as a raging maniac.”

28 | The 4-Hour Workweek | Tim Ferriss

“Alternating periods of activity and rest is necessary to survive, let alone thrive. Capacity, interest, and mental endurance all wax and wane. Plan accordingly.”

29 | The Peter Principle | Raymond Hull

“Anything that works will be used in progressively more challenging applications until it fails.”

30 | Crazy Bosses | Stanley Bing

“After nearly 6,000 years of evidence on the subject, one thing stands clear: the people who end up as leaders in any organization, large or small, are often the craziest guys around.”

Read also: Are you a Leader? These 11 major attributes of Leadership will tell.

31 | 21 Dirty Tricks at Work | Mike Phipps & Colin Gautrey

“Dirty tricks are more than just a career-threatening nuisance; they also form part of the political backdrop to all the great recent organizational scandals.”

32 | Don’t Bring It to Work | Sylvia Lafair

“The reason most organizational programs abort is that they fail to deal with our life patterns, which are at the foundation of workplace anxiety, tension, and conflict.”

33 | Poorly Made in China | Paul Midler

“American companies…were no match for savvy Chinese industrialists who often went out of their way to manipulate product specifications to widen profit margins.”

34 | Mastering the Complex Sale | Jeff Thull

“Customers are wrestling with mission-critical decisions, evaluating solutions that all sound the same, and struggling to achieve the value they expect, when experience has shown them that far too many solutions come packaged with a high degree of risk and a low probability of success.”

35 | The Psychology of Selling | Brian Tracy

“Salespeople are the most vital people in any business. Without sales, the biggest and most sophisticated companies shut down. Sales are the spark plug in the engine of free enterprise. There is a direct relationship between the success of the sales community and the success of the entire country.”

36 | Strategic Selling | Brian Tracy

“A hundred years ago–even 20 or 30 years ago–it was possible, if not always easy, to close major business by calling on and satisfying a key decision-maker. Today, every piece of business entails multiple decisions, and those decisions are virtually never made by the same person. Not only do you have to contend with multiple decisions, but the people who make those decisions may not even work in the same place.”

37 | Perfect Selling | Linda Richardson

“Your opening can be the most human part of the call. It can be the most personal. You can be the most awkward and uncomfortable. It can also be the most gracious and fun. It can be many of these things at once. It is always telling.”

38 | How to Master the Art of Selling | Tom Hopkins

“I learned a long time ago that selling is the highest-paid hard work–and the lowest-paid easy work–that I could find. And I also found out another exciting thing about selling–the choice was mine. I discovered that what I did achieve in my selling career was entirely up to me, and that what anyone else wanted wasn’t going to make much difference. The only thing that really mattered was what I did for myself, and what I gave to myself.”

39 | The Little Red Book of Selling | Jeffrey Gitomer

“It never ceases to amaze me that companies will spend thousands of hours and millions of dollars teaching people ‘how to sell,’ and not one minute or not $10 on ‘why they buy.’ And ‘why they buy’ is all that matters.”

40 | Spin Selling | Neil Rackham

“The traditional selling models, methods, and techniques that most of us have been trained to use work best in small sales. For now, let me define small as a sale which can normally be completed in a single call and which involves a low dollar value. Unfortunately, these tried-and-true low-value sales techniques, most of them dating from the 1920s, don’t work today.”

Read also: There is nothing to fear but fear itself.

41 | The Richest Man In Babylon | George Samuel Clason

“Budget thy expenses that thou mayest have coins to pay for thy necessities, to pay for thy enjoyments, and to gratify thy worthwhile desires without spending more than nine-tenths of thy earnings.”

42 | Rich dad, Poor Dad | Robert Kiyosaki

“The key to financial freedom and great wealth is a person’s ability or skill to convert earned income into passive income and/or portfolio income.”

43 | The Millionaire Fast Lane | M. J. DeMarco

“Show me a 22-year-old who got rich investing in mutual funds. Show me the man who earned millions in three years by maximizing his 401(k). Show me the young twentysomething who got rich clipping coupons. Where are these people? They don’t exist.”

44 | Your Money or Your Life | Joseph R. Dominguez

“Conditions have changed, but we are still operating financially by the rules established during the Industrial Revolution–rules based on creating more material possessions. But our high standard of living has not led to a high quality of life–for us or for the planet.”

45 | Total Money Makeover | Dave Ramsey

“What I have done is packaged the time-honored information into a process that is doable and has inspired millions to act on it.”

46 | Good To Great | James C. Collins

“Our findings do not represent a quick fix, or the next fashion statement in a long string of management fads, or the next buzzword of the day, or a new ‘program’ to introduce. No! The only way to make any company visionary is through a long-term commitment to an eternal process of building the organization to preserve the core and stimulate progress.”

47 | The Black Swan | Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“Our world is dominated by the extreme, the unknown, and the very improbable (improbable according to our current knowledge)–and all the while, we spend our time engaged in small talk, focusing on the known, and the repeated.”

48 | The Innovator’s Dilemma | Clayton M. Christensen

“Because these firms listened to their customers, invested aggressively in new technologies that would provide their customers more and better products of the sort they wanted, and because they carefully studied market trends and systematically allocated investment capital to innovations that promised the best returns, they lost their positions of leadership.”

49 | The Mythical Man-Month | Fred Brooks

“Systems program building is an entropy-decreasing process, hence inherently metastable. Program maintenance is an entropy-increasing process, and even its most skillful execution only delays the subsidence of the system into unfixable obsolescence.”

50 | The Dilbert Principle | Scott Adams

“We’re a planet of nearly 6 billion ninnies living in a civilization that was created by a few thousand amazingly smart deviants.”

By Aline Kerneis
Founder at Boost Your Impact, VC Investor & Virgin StartUp Mentor

Ever since, Aline has been advising hundreds of entrepreneurs, startups, inventors and SMEs of a wide range of markets. She has provided business & personal coaching for many of these clients, helping them to unlock their full potential.

Previously, Aline graduated from the International Business School (Paris) with two Business Master’s degrees and, before that, with a Management HND and a second-year university degree in Laws & Economics. However, she was – and is still – a self-taught, constantly studying key books from all over the world to keep adding new knowledge and skills to her existing portfolio with one single objective: bringing more value to her clients.

In five years, she will set up a global foundation based on a pyramidal scheme to help abused women transform their lives through walking the entrepreneurial road.

She is also a mind-shaking writer.