100 Inspirational Quotes About Success From 10 Billionaires

Who’s in a better position to teach us about success?

Get in the mind of the top 1% who were able to grow their bank accounts in the 9 digits.

From Bill Gates to Sara Blakely, these 10 influential billionaires have something in common.

You will understand what I mean as you go through the quotes.

Here are the 100 inspirational quotes about success from 10 billionaires.

1. Bill Gates

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

“Patience is a key element of success.”

“People always fear change. People feared electricity when it was invented, didn’t they?”

“I really had a lot of dreams when I was a kid and I think a great deal of that grew out of the fact that I had a chance to read a lot.”

“We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten. Don’t let yourself be lulled into inaction.”

“Life is not fair — get used to it!”

“Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.”

2. Carlos Slim

“When we face our problems, they disappear. So learn from failure and let success be the silent incentive.”

“Live the present intensely and fully, do not let the past be a burden, and let the future be an incentive.”

“I don’t believe too much in luck. I believe in circumstances. I believe in work.”

“Firm and patient optimism always yields its rewards.”

“Competition makes you better, always, always makes you better, even if the competitor wins.”

“Work well done is not only a responsibility to yourselves and society; it is also an emotional need.”

“Success is not about doing things well or even very well, or being acknowledged by others. It is not an external opinion, but rather an internal status. It is the harmony between the soul and your emotions, which requires love, family, friendship, authenticity and integrity.”

“When you live for others’ opinions, you are dead. I don’t want to live thinking about how I’ll be remembered.”

3. Warren Buffett

“You only have to do a very few things right in your life so long as you don’t do too many things wrong.”

“I insist on a lot of time being spent, almost every day, to just sit and think. That is very uncommon in American business. I read and think. So I do more reading and thinking, and make less impulse decisions than most people in business. I do it because I like this kind of life.”

“Rule No. 1: never lose money; rule No. 2: don’t forget rule No. 1.”

“It is not necessary to do extraordinary things to get extraordinary results.”

“Risk comes from not knowing what you are doing.”

“The most important thing to do if you find yourself in a hole is to stop digging.”

“It’s better to hang out with people better than you. Pick out associates whose behavior is better than yours and you’ll drift in that direction.”

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

“I always knew I was going to be rich. I don’t think I ever doubted it for a minute.”

“Honesty is a very expensive gift. Don’t expect it from cheap people.”

“Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.”

“The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything.”

“In the world of business, the people who are most successful are those who are doing what they love.”

“You know… you keep doing the same things and you keep getting the same result over and over again.”

“You’ve gotta keep control of your time, and you can’t unless you say no. You can’t let people set your agenda in life.”

“Opportunities come infrequently. When it rains gold, put out the bucket, not the thimble.”

“If past history was all that is needed to play the game of money, the richest people would be librarians.”

“Tell me who your heroes are and I’ll tell you who you’ll turn out to be.”

“The most important investment you can make is in yourself.”

4. Larry Ellison

“Life’s a journey. It’s a journey about discovering limits.”

“Great achievers are driven, not so much by the pursuit of success, but by the fear of failure.”

“The most important aspect of my personality as far as determining my success goes; has been my questioning conventional wisdom, doubting experts and questioning authority. While that can be painful in your relationships with your parents and teachers, it’s enormously useful in life.”

“When you innovate, you’ve got to be prepared for people telling you that you are nuts.”

“You have to believe in what you do in order to get what you want.”

“When you are the first person whose beliefs are different from what everyone else believes, you are basically saying, ‘I’m right and everyone else is wrong.’ That’s a very unpleasant position to be in. It’s at once exhilaration and the same time an invitation to be attacked.”

“You have to act and act now.”

“I have had all the disadvantes required for success”

“There’s a wonderful saying that’s dead wrong. ‘Why did you climb the mountain?’ ‘I climbed the mountain because it was there.’ That’s utter nonsense…You climbed the mountain because you were there, and you were curious if you could do it. You wondered what it would be like.”

“When you live your life in different ways, it makes people around you become uncomfortable. So deal with it. They don’t know what you are going to do.”

“When I do something, it is all about self-discovery. I want to learn and discover my own limits.”

“When I started Oracle, what I wanted to do was to create an environment where I would enjoy working. That was my primary goal. Sure, I wanted to make a living. I certainly never expected to become rich, certainly not this rich. I mean, rich does not even describe this. This is surreal. And it has nothing to do with money. I mean, you buy clothes with money, and cars. But I really wanted to work with people I enjoyed working with, who I admired and liked.”

5. Steve Jobs

“Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me … Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful… that’s what matters to me.”

“I’m the only person I know that’s lost a quarter of a billion dollars in one year…. It’s very character-building.”

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”

“I’m not dismissing the value of higher education; I’m simply saying it comes at the expense of experience.”

“Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations.”

“That’s been one of my mantras — focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”

“The greatest artists like Dylan, Picasso and Newton risked failure. And if we want to be great, we’ve got to risk it too.”

“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.”

“You’ve got to have a problem that you want to solve; a wrong that you want to right.”

“I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what’s next.”

“It [what you choose to do] has got to be something that you’re passionate about because otherwise you won’t have the perseverance to see it through.”

“I’m convinced that about half of what separates successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.”

“My favorite things in life don’t cost any money. It’s really clear that the most precious resource we all have is time.”

6. Mark Zuckerberg’s

“In a world that’s changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.”

“People think innovation is just having a good idea but a lot of it is just moving quickly and trying a lot of things.”

“The question isn’t ‘What do we want to know about people?’ It’s, ‘What do people want to tell about themselves?”

“Move fast and break things. Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough.”

“This is a perverse thing, personally, but I would rather be in the cycle where people are underestimating us. It gives us the latitude to go out and make big bets that excite and amaze people.”

“People can be really smart or have skills that are directly applicable, but if they don’t really believe in it, then they are not going to really work hard.”

“The question I ask myself like almost every day is, ‘Am I doing the most important thing I could be doing?”

“The biggest risk is not taking any risk.”

“I think a simple rule of business is, if you do the things that are easier first, then you can actually make a lot of progress.”

“I’m here to build something for the long-term. Anything else is a distraction.”

“Find that thing you are super passionate about.“

“People don’t care about what you say, they care about what you build.”

“I remember really vividly, you know, having pizza with my friends a day or two after — I opened up the first version of Facebook at the time I thought, ‘You know, someone needs to build a service like this for the world. But I just never thought that we’d be the ones to help do it. And I think a lot of what it comes down to is we just cared more.”

7. Jeff Bezos

“If you double the number of experiments you do per year you’re going to double your inventiveness.”

“If you decide that you’re going to do only the things you know are going to work, you’re going to leave a lot of opportunity on the table.”

“You have to be willing to be misunderstood if you’re going to innovate.”

“Your brand is what other people say about you when you’re not in the room.”

“We’ve had three big ideas at Amazon that we’ve stuck with for 18 years, and they’re the reason we’re successful: Put the customer first. Invent. And be patient.”

“In the old world, you devoted 30% of your time to building a great service and 70% of your time to shouting about it. In the new world, that inverts.”

“You don’t choose your passions. Your passions choose you.”

8. Michael Bloomberg

“Being an entrepreneur isn’t really about starting a business, It’s a way of looking at the world: seeing opportunity where others see obstacles, taking risks when others take refuge.”

“The next day after I got fired, literally the next day, I started a new company.”

“You must first be willing to fail – and you must have the courage to go for ir anyway.”

“Life is too short to spend your time avoiding failure.”

“Don’t be afraid to assert yourself, have confidence in your abilities and don’t let the bastards get you down.”

“I’ve always respected those who tried to change the world for the better, rather than just complain about it.”

“After hard work, the biggest determinant is being in the right place at the right time.”

9. Ted Turner

“Life is a game. Money is how we keep score.”

“You should set goals beyond your reach so you always have something to live for.”

“When you lose small businesses, you lose big ideas. People who own their own businesses are their own bosses. They are independent thinkers. They know they can’t compete by imitating the big guys; they have to innovate. So they are less obsessed with earnings than they are with ideas.”

“You can never quit. Winner never quit, and quitters never win.”

“I just love it when people say I can’t do it, there’s nothing that makes me feel better because all my life, people have said that I wasn’t going to make it. “

“I’ve never run into a guy who could win at the top level in anything today and didn’t have the right attitude, didn’t give it everything he had, at least while he was doing it; wasn’t prepared and didn’t have the whole program worked out.”

10. Sara Blakely

“It’s important to be willing to make mistakes. The worst thing that can happen is you become memorable.”

“My dad encouraged us to fail growing up. He would ask us what we failed at that week. If we didn’t have something, he would be disappointed. It changed my mindset at an early age that failure is not the outcome–failure is not trying. Don’t be afraid to fail.”

“Don’t be intimidated by what you don’t know. That can be your greatest strength and ensure that you do things differently from everyone else.”

“Embrace what you don’t know, especially in the beginning, because what you don’t know can become your greatest asset.”

“I made a conscious decision not to tell anyone in my life. Now I tell people–don’t tell anyone your idea until you have invested enough of yourself in it that you are not going to turn back. When a person has an idea at that conception moment, it is the most vulnerable–one negative comment could knock you off course.”

“You’ve got to visualize where you’re headed and be very clear about it. Take a Polaroid picture of where you’re going to be in a few years.”

“If somebody can do something 80 percent as good as you think you would have done it yourself, then you’ve got to let it go.”

“There is a hidden blessing in the most traumatic things we go through in our lives. My brain always goes to, ‘Where is the hidden blessing? What is my gift?”

“Failures are life’s way of nudging you and letting you know you are off course. Trying new things and not being afraid to fail along the way are more important than what you learn in school.”

“Failure is not attached to outcome, but in not trying. This way, it is about answering to yourself.”

“Failure to me became not trying versus not succeeding.”