139 Inspirational Quotes for Entrepreneurs and Hustlers

The best entrepreneur quotes to motivate you to keep going

Today, we’ll dive into a topic close to every entrepreneur’s heart: quotes for entrepreneurs.

Yes, those little snippets of wisdom that seem to have the power to light a fire within us, spark creativity, and push us through those tough entrepreneurial days.

Whether you’re a seasoned business owner or just starting on your journey, quotes have this magical ability to uplift, inspire, and sometimes even slap a high-five to your soul. 

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A list of 139 quotes for entrepreneurs

1. “A friendship founded on business is better than a business founded on friendship.” —John D. Rockefeller
2. “A good leader is not necessarily the most popular person in their business, but the best ones are liked because they are respected for their clarity and vision.” —Alan Sugar
3. “A leader is one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way.” — John C. Maxwell
4. “A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” — Steve Jobs
5. “Aerodynamically, the bumblebee shouldn’t be able to fly, but the bumblebee doesn’t know that, so it goes on flying anyway.” — Mary Kay Ash
6. “Always aim high, work hard, and care deeply about what you believe in. And, when you stumble, keep faith. And, when you’re knocked down, get right back up and never listen to anyone who says you can’t or shouldn’t go on.” — Hillary Clinton
7. “An entrepreneur tends to bite off a little more than he can chew hoping he’ll quickly learn how to chew it.” —Roy Ash
8. “As a founder, lay all the possible scenarios—from best to worst—in front of you, so you don’t get surprised when something happens.” — Brian Wong
9. “As long as you’re going to be thinking anyway, think big.” — Donald Trump
10. “Be nicer to your customers than your competitors.” — Richard Reed

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11. “Being a woman in business doesn’t come without challenges. My advice? Surround yourself with other supportive women that encourage you, share ideas, and get you motivated.” — Jessica Alba
12. “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. ” — Steve Jobs
13. “Build your business success around something that you love — something that is inherently and endlessly interesting to you.” — Martha Stewart
14. “Business opportunities are like buses; there’s always another one coming.” —Richard Branson
15. “Choose a job that you like, and you will never have to work a day in your life.” — Confucius
16. “Coming together is a beginning; keeping together is progress; working together is success.” — Henry Ford
17. “Dear optimist, pessimist, and realist – while you guys were busy arguing about the glass of wine, I drank it! Sincerely, the opportunist!” — Lori Greiner
18. “Do not focus on numbers. Focus on doing what you do best. It’s about building a community who want to visit your site every day because you create value and offer expertise.” — Cassey Ho
19. “Don’t expect anything from anybody; work hard, put your head down, be good at what you do, and good stuff will happen…” —Deborah Meaden
20. “Don’t assume that borrowing lots of money can make your startup fly. There are many things to the business other than investors, and it’s possible to succeed with your startup without breaking the bank.” — Barnaby Lashbrooke

21. “Don’t get distracted. Never tell yourself that you need to be the biggest brand in the whole world. Start by working on what you need at the present moment and then what you need to do tomorrow. So, set yourself manageable targets.” — Jas Bagniewski
22. “Don’t let anyone convince you that your dream, your vision to be an entrepreneur, is something that you shouldn’t do. What often happens is that people who are well meaning, who really care for us, are afraid for us and talk us out of it.” — Cathy Hughes, entrepreneur, radio and television personality, and business executive
23. “Don’t let others convince you that the idea is good when your gut tells you it’s bad.” — Kevin Rose
24. “Don’t spend time beating on a wall, hoping to transform it into a door.” — Coco Chanel
25. “Don’t try to do everything by yourself, but try to connect with people and resources. Having that discipline and perseverance is really important.” — Chieu Cao
26. “Don’t worry about being successful, but work toward being significant, and success will naturally follow.” — Oprah Winfrey
27. “Entrepreneurs are willing to work 80 hours a week to avoid working 40 hours a week for someone else.” — Lori Greiner
28. “Entrepreneurs must be willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time.” — Jeff Bezos
29. “Entrepreneurship is living a few years of your life like most people won’t, so you can spend the rest of your life like most people cant.” — Warren G. Tracy’s student
30. “Every time you state what you want or believe, you’re the first to hear it…” — Oprah Winfrey

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31. “Everyone should pull their finger out and start a business and to believe in themselves. There is nothing else to it. Anyone can make a £100m. But most people don’t go out and try. They just stand in the pub and complain.” —Duncan Bannatyne
32. “Fearlessness is not the absence of fear. It’s the mastery of fear. It’s about getting up one more time than we fall down.” — Arianna Huffington
33. “Five days a week, I read my goals before I go to sleep and when I wake up. There are 10 goals around health, family, and business with expiration dates, and I update them every six months.” — Daymond John
34. “Formal education will make you a living; self—education will make you a fortune.” — Jim Rohn
35. “Fundraising is much easier now because of crowdfunding. Take advantage of that.” — Constantin Bisanz
36. “Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.” — Thomas Edison
37. “Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds.” — Albert Einstein
38. “I can name dozens of failures that we had over the years. Yet, with all these failures, we still managed to build Appster into one of the largest, and best companies in our industry. So, remember every time you fail, remind yourself these words: ‘Life won’t always go my way, but I will always find a way’.” — Josiah Humphrey
39. “I don’t believe in failure. It is not failure if you enjoyed the process.” —Oprah Winfrey
40. “I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.” — Bill Cosby

41. “I had to make my own living and my own opportunity. But I made it! Don’t sit down and wait for the opportunities to come. Get up and make them.” —Madam C. J. Walker
42. “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” — Thomas Edison
43. “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” —Thomas Edison
44. “I love what I do.” — Every Truly Successful Person
45. “I never dreamed about success. I worked for it.” — Estee Lauder
46. “I never dreamed about success. I worked for it.” — Estée Lauder
47. “I’m always tweaking, always trying to make it better, constantly moving the levers and dials.” —Steve Ells
48. “If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking.” — George S. Patton
49. “If something is important enough, or you believe something is important enough, even if you are scared, you will keep going.” — Elon Musk
50. “If we are going to be part of the solution, we have to engage the problems.” —Majora Carter, urban revitalization strategist and broadcast producer

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51. “If we tried to think of a good idea, we wouldn’t have been able to think of a good idea. You just have to find the solution for a problem in your own life.” — Brian Chesky
52. “If you are not getting traction on your idea, you try few things. You try pushing harder, cleaning up something, building up to something aggressively —— but if it doesn’t get traction, then don’t bother.” —Vijay Sharma
53. “If you are working on a product that’s going to be consumer—facing, then feedback is invaluable. You should be out there being brave and talking to people, and asking for feedback as much as possible.” — Emily Brooke
54. “If you can offer a free tier that provides a lot of value, it will naturally help your product to spread much more rapidly.” — Melanie Perkins
55. “If you cannot do great things, do small things in a great way.” — Napoleon Hill
56. “If you can’t do great things, do small things in a great way.” — Napoleon Hill
57. “If you don’t build your dream, someone else will hire you to build theirs.” — Tony Gaskins
58. “If you don’t get out of the box you’ve been raised in, you won’t understand how much bigger the world is.” — Angelina Jolie
59. “If you know too much before the start, then you will get overwhelmed. Come up with an original idea, and don’t copy because there will be no passion. You need that otherworldly passion. Just start.” — Jeni Britton Bauer
60. “If you start thinking you are good at something, that’s often the day you stop trying to be better and open the back door for someone to come after you. That’s why we always aim higher. We never feel like we’re done.” — Drew Houston

61. “If you tune it so that you have zero chance of failure, you usually also have zero chance of success. The key is to look at ways for when you get to your failure checkpoint, you know to stop.” — Reid Hoffman
62. “If you want to be the best, you have to do things that other people aren’t willing to do.” — Michael Phelps
63. “If you’re starting something on your own, you better have a passion for it, because this is hard work.” — Sallie Krawcheck
64. “Ignore the hype of the startups that you see in the press. Mostly, it’s a pack of lies. Half of these startups will be dead in a year. So, focus on building your business so you can be the one left standing.” —Jules Pieri
65. “In the age of transparency, honesty, and generosity, even in the form of an apology, generate goodwill.” — Alexander Asseily
66. “Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship. The act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth.” — Peter Drucker
67. “Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” —Albert Einstein
68. “It comes down to finding something you love to do and then just trying to be great at it.” — Mark Cuban
69. “It is always the start that requires the greatest effort.” —James Cash Penney
70. “It starts with not having a hangover with the way things used to be.” —Kevin Plank

71. “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it…” — Warren Buffett
72. “It’s fine to celebrate success, but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.” — Bill Gates
73. “It’s important to realize that brand is much more than a logo and slogan. A brand is who your company is: how you function and make decisions.” —Joanna McFarland
74. “It’s necessary to find a mentor who can invest time to know your personal capabilities and business model.” — Nigel Davies
75. “It’s very important for entrepreneurs to look for people in the company who are not afraid of failures, for example, intrapreneurs. They make a business more successful by thinking like an entrepreneur, but within a company.” —Chirag Kulkarni
76. “I’m convinced that about half of what separates successful entrepreneurs from the non—successful ones is pure perseverance.” — Steve Jobs
77. “Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions…” — Mark Twain
78. “Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.” — Albert Einstein
79. “Most of us want to tell our coworkers or friends, or husbands or wives, our ideas. For what reason? We want validation. But I feel ideas are most vulnerable in their infancy. Out of love and concern, friends and family give all the reasons or objections on why [you] shouldn’t do it. I didn’t want to risk that.” —Sara Blakely
80. “My advice is to focus on the importance of forging a long—term relationship, whether with colleagues, partners, or customers. It is often easy to get caught up in short—term decisions.” — Sheila Lirio Marcelo

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81. “My biggest motivation? Just to keep challenging myself…” — Richard Branson
82. “My first six years in the business were hopeless. There are a lot of times when you sit and you say, ‘Why am I doing this? I’ll never make it. It’s just not going to happen. I should go out and get a real job and try to survive.’” — George Lucas
83. “No matter how many customers you have, each is an individual. The day you start thinking of them as this amorphous ‘collection’ and stop thinking of them as people is the day you start going out of business.” — Dharmesh Shah
84. “Nothing will work unless you do.” — Maya Angelou
85. “One of the greatest skills of leadership is being unflappable. Anytime you do anything in the world; there’s going to be criticism.” —Arianna Huffington
86. “One of the huge mistakes people make is that they try to force an interest on themselves…” — Jeff Bezos
87. “One of the things I tend to do is open myself up to a variety of voices. I try to expose myself to the kind of culture shock that occurs when you talk to people who speak a different language.” — Pierre Omidyar
88. “Only the paranoid survive.” — Andy Grove
89. “Passion, creativity, and resilience are the most crucial skills in business. If you’ve got those, you’re ready to embark on the journey.” — Jo Malone
90. “People are definitely a company’s greatest asset. It doesn’t make any difference whether the product is cars or cosmetics. A company is only as good as the people it keeps.” —Mary Kay Ash

91. “Perseverance is failing nineteen times and succeeding the twentieth.” — Julie Andrews
92. “Remain self—funded as long as possible.” —Garrett Camp
93. “Selling is not a pushy, winner-takes-all, macho act. It is an empathy-led, process-driven, and knowledge—intensive discipline. Because, in the end, people buy from people.” —Subroto Bagchi
94. “Some days you’re smiling and thinking you’re going to make this thing rock. Then the next day a pipe breaks, and your costs look too high. You have to learn to keep your eyes on an ultimate goal. If you lose sight of that goal, you have to get out.” — Hamdi Ulukaya
95. “Someone is sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.” — Warren Buffett
96. “Sometimes, it doesn’t hurt to ask. I have been in the news many times just by calling on the news channel and asking them about featuring my business.” —Lori Cheek
97. “Start as small as you can. When I started SkinnyMe Tea, I had $24 in the bank, and I was entirely self—funded. If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product; you’ve launched too late.” — Gretta Rose van Riel
98. “Success depends on employees. For me, knowing and connecting with my employees is very important.” —Divine Ndhlukula
99. “Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.” — Albert Schweitzer
100. “Success is not what you have, but who you are.” — Bo Bennet

101. “Success is walking from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.” — Winston Churchill
102. “The best way to predict the future is to create it.” — Peter Drucker
103. “The difference between successful people and others is how long they spend feeling sorry for themselves.” — Barbara Corcoran
104. “The function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers.” — Ralph Nader
105. “The most valuable thing you can make is a mistake—you can’t learn anything from being perfect.” — Adam Osborne
106. “The only way of finding the limits of the possible is by going beyond them into the impossible.” — Arthur C. Clarke
107. “The only way you can measure your success is by reflecting and seeing what you want out of the experience. And the journey is just as much a part of the success you seek.” — Jessica Alba
108. “The price of success is hard work, dedication to the job at hand, and the determination that whether we win or lose, we have applied the best of ourselves to the task at hand.” — Vince Lombardi
109. “The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me?” — Ayn Rand
110. “The road to success and the road to failure are almost exactly the same.” —Colin R. Davis

111. “The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.” —Walt Disney
112. “There is no royal flower—strewn path to success. And if there is, I have not found it, for whatever success I have attained has been the result of much hard work and many sleepless nights.” —Madam C.J. Walker
113. “There is only one success—to be able to spend your life in your own way.” — Christopher Morley
114. “There is something artificial when everyone is agreeing with each other. It’s useful to indulge people who don’t agree, and see their viewpoint, or force yourself to explain things better.” —David Sack
115. “Things do not happen. Things are made to happen.” — John F. Kennedy
116. “To win without risk is to triumph without glory.” — Corneille
117. “Twenty years from now, you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do…” — Mark Twain
118. “Watch, listen, and learn. You can’t know it all yourself. Anyone who thinks they do is destined for mediocrity.” —Donald Trump
119. “We learned many things while building FourSquare. One of the most important lessons is to be clear to investors about what the company will and will not do. And be open about the priorities of the things that have to be done.” — Dennis Crowley
120. “What I’ve learned from running is that the time to push hard is when you’re hurting like crazy and you want to give up. Success is often just around the corner.” — James Dyson

121. “What is not started will never get finished” — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
122. “Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, the mind can achieve.” — Napoleon Hill
123. “When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it.” — Henry Ford
124. “When in doubt, bootstrap. Using your own personal resources is the easiest way to start a business. You don’t have to convince investors about the merits of your idea. You just have to convince yourself.” —Ryan Holmes, Co—founder of Hootsuite
125. “When it is obvious that the goals cannot be reached, don’t adjust the goals; adjust the steps.” — Confucius
126. “When you cease to dream, you cease to live.” — Malcolm Forbes
127. “Winners never quit, and quitters never win.” — Vince Lombardi
128. “Work hard in silence. Let success make the noise.” — Unknown
129. “Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow has not yet come. We have only today. Let us begin.” — Mother Teresa
130. “You can fail at what you don’t want, so you might as well take a chance on doing what you love.” — Jim Carrey

131. “You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.” — Jack London
132. “You don’t learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing, and by falling over.” — Richard Branson
133. “You have to get good at ceding control and not taking things personally. Even seasoned entrepreneurs have struggled with that. I think it’s about not taking failures personally and also not taking successes personally.” — Leila Janah
134. “You have to see failure as the beginning and the middle, but never entertain it as an end.” — Jessica Herrin
135. “You may be disappointed if you fail, but you are doomed if you don’t try.” — Beverly Sills
136. “Your ability to attract, evaluate, and forge strong working relationships with co—founders, early employees, and investors often mean the difference between failure and success.” — Clara Shih
137. “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.” — Bill Gates
138. “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life…” — Steve Jobs
139. “…build a culture that cares about quality.” — Margaret Gould Stewart

Why should I read these quotes for entrepreneurs?

Fuel for the soul

Think of these quotes as fuel for your entrepreneurial soul. They’re like little power-ups that boost your confidence, reignite your passion, and keep your vision crystal clear, even on the toughest days.

Perspective shifters

Ever find yourself stuck in a rut, unable to see beyond the immediate challenges? These quotes have a knack for shifting your perspective, helping you see obstacles as opportunities and setbacks as stepping stones to success.

Wisdom from the pros

Behind every great quote is a nugget of wisdom distilled from the experiences of successful entrepreneurs who’ve walked the path before you.

Soak up their knowledge like a sponge, and let it guide you through your own entrepreneurial journey.

Motivation on tap

When motivation feels elusive, these quotes are like a tap you can turn on whenever you need a boost. They’re like your own personal cheerleading squad, reminding you of your potential and cheering you on to greatness.

Mindset mastery

Entrepreneurship is as much about mindset as it is about strategy. These quotes help you cultivate the resilient, growth-oriented mindset you need to thrive in the ever-changing landscape of business.

Community connection

Reading these quotes can make you feel like part of a supportive community of like-minded dreamers and doers.

It’s like having a virtual coffee chat with fellow entrepreneurs who understand the highs, lows, and everything in between.

Actionable insights

Beyond inspiration, many of these quotes offer practical insights and actionable advice that you can apply directly to your business. Consider them your secret weapon for leveling up your entrepreneurial game.

What are your favorite quotes for entrepreneurs?