Great Thoughts on Sales, Business and Success

I love quotations. A good quotation can inspire you, enlighten you or make you laugh. Some quotations can do all three at once. Here are some of my all-time favorites:

“Sales are contingent upon the attitude of the salesman—not the attitude of the prospect.” —W. Clement Stone

“Youthfulness of spirit is the twin brother of optimism, and optimism is the stuff of which American business success is fashioned. Resist growing up!” —B.C. Forbes

“When you make a mistake, don’t look back at it long. Mistakes are lessons of wisdom. The past cannot be changed. The future is yet in your power.” —Hugh White

“The first and most important step toward success is the feeling that we can succeed.” —Nelson Boswell

“Pretend that every single person you meet has a sign around his or her neck that says, ‘Make me feel important.’ Not only will you succeed in sales, you will succeed in life.” —Mary Kay Ash

“Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.”   —Mark Twain

“We are continually faced by great opportunities brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems.” —Lee Iacocca

“Your most important sale in life is to sell yourself to yourself.” —Maxwell Maltz

“The surest hindrance of success is to have too high a standard of refinement in our own minds, or too high an opinion of the judgment of the public. He who is determined not to be satisfied with anything short of perfection will never do anything to please himself or others.” —William Hazlitt

“Don’t think of it as failure. Think of it as time-released success.” —Robert Orben

“No matter how good you get you can always get better and that’s the exciting part.” —Tiger Woods

“We ask ourselves, ‘who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’ Actually, who are you not to be?” —Marianne Williamson

“A great pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.” —Walter Bagehot

“No one can possibly achieve any real and lasting success or “get rich” in business by being a conformist.” —J. Paul Getty

“Reality can be beaten with enough imagination.” —Anonymous