A collection of quotes for entrepreneurs curated in April 2026 around theme of dreams, visions, and aspirations.
Quotes for Entrepreneurs Curated in April 2026
I curate these quotes for entrepreneurs from a variety of sources and tweet them on @skmurphy about once a day where you can get them hot off the mojo wire. At the end of each month I curate them in a blog post that adds commentary and may contain a longer passage from the same source for context.
My theme for this month’s “Quotes for Entrepreneurs” is dreams, visions, and aspirations.
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“It takes a lot of courage to show your dreams to someone else.”
Erma Bombeck
I originally curated this in September 2010, noting that this is an early challenge entrepreneurs must overcome to move forward to be able to pursue their dreams.
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“The greatest achievement was at first and for a time a dream. The oak sleeps in the acorn, the bird waits in the egg, and in the highest vision of the soul a waking angel stirs. Dreams are the seedlings of realities.”
James Allen in “As a Man Thinketh” Chapter 6 (1902)
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Nick Bilton: Why did you start investing in space-related start-ups?
Steve Jurvetson: My interest in space started early, but for many years I could not find any space-related investments that really penciled-out for venture. That changed in 2009 when Elon Musk came to us with a big vision to explore Mars, while producing rockets at a fraction of a price and making space accessible.
From “A Conversation With Steve Jurvetson, Space Investor and Rocket Maker” (Mar-17-2014)
Related:
- Steve Jurvetson (@FutureJurvetson) Future Ventures / Flickr Blog
- Jurvetson accepted Churchill Club 2012 game changer award for Space-X (starts 10 min in)
- Steve Jurvetson Bats 1,000 at the Churchill Club 2008-17
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“In many schools today, the phrase “computer-aided instruction” means making the computer teach the child. One might say the computer is being used to program the child. In my vision, the child programs the computer and, in doing so, both acquires a sense of master over a piece of the most modern and powerful technology and establishes an intimate contact with some of the deepest ideas from science, from mathematics, and from the art of intellectual model building.”
Seymour Papert in “Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas” (1980)
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“The difference between a vision and a hallucination is how many people you can get to believe they see it, too.”
Gene Spafford
h/t Quotable Spaf
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“The effort of the economist is to see, to picture the interplay of economic elements. The more clearly cut these elements appear in his vision, the better; the more elements he can grasp and hold in his mind at once, the better. The economic world is a misty region. The first explorers used unaided vision. Mathematics is the lantern by which what before was dimly visible now looms up in firm, bold outlines. The old phantasmagoria disappear. We see better. We also see further.”
Irving Fisher in “Mathematical Investigations in the Theory of Value and Prices” (1892)
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“As an armchair observer without a shred of economic acumen, I see a continuum of outcomes.”
Kyle Kingsbury in “The Future Of Everything is Lies, I Guess: Work“
A candid perspective in a thought-provoking essay on AI and Automation.
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“As entrepreneurs we pursue our dreams of improving the world. Sometimes I think our dreams can pursue us, that a vision of a better world can have the same effect as what the Scots call a geas. An obligation to use our talents toward certain goals that unlocks our power if obeyed and punishes if we don’t respect it.”
Sean Murphy in While We Pursue Our Dreams, They Can Pursue Us
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“Prudence is foresight and far-sightedness. It’s the ability to make immediate decisions on the basis of their longer-range effects.”
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“The optimal state of inner experience is one in which there is order in consciousness. This happens when psychic energy—or attention—is invested in realistic goals, and when skills match the opportunities for action. The pursuit of a goal brings order in awareness because a person must concentrate attention on the task at hand and momentarily forget everything else. These periods of struggling to overcome challenges are what people find to be the most enjoyable times of their lives.”
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in “Flow”
Csikszentmihalyi outlines eight major components of a flow experience:
- We have a chance of completing the task.
- We can concentrate on the task.
- There are clear goals.
- We get immediate feedback.
- We are deeply involved in the task and forget our worries.
- We feel in control of our actions.
- Concern for the self disappears, yet paradoxically the sense of self emerges stronger after the flow experience is over.
- The sense of the duration of time is altered; hours pass by in minutes, and minutes can stretch out to seem like hours.
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“Many situations in life are similar to going on a hike: the view changes once you start walking.
You don’t need all the answers right now. New paths will reveal themselves if you have the courage to get started.”
James Clear
Sometimes the decision to make a start is all the vision you need. This reminds me of a passage I quoted in “Burn Your Boats, Not Your Bridges” from W. H. Murray‘s 1951 book, The Scottish Himalayan Expedition.
“Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. I have learned a deep respect for one of Goethe’s couplets:
‘Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.’”W. H. Murray in his 1951 book, The Scottish Himalayan Expedition.
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“The hardest single part of building a software system is deciding precisely what to build. No other part of the conceptual work is so difficult as establishing the detailed technical requirements, including all the interfaces to people, to machines, and to other software systems. No other part of the work so cripples the resulting system if done wrong. No other part is more difficult to rectify later.”
Fred Brooks “No Silver Bullet: Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering” (1986)
Deciding what to build and specifying it requires vision. I blogged about “No Silver Bullet” and it’s sequel in Fred Brooks’ “No Silver Bullet” Revisited; I curated a quote from “No Silver Bullet in Quotes for Entrepreneurs Collected in February 2018, and curated the first two sentences of this quote in March 2017
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“The best way to keep something bad from happening is to see it ahead of time, and you can’t see it if you refuse to face the possibility.”
William Burroughs in “Rock Magic: Jimmy Page, Led Zeppelin, And a search for the elusive Stairway to Heaven “
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“Forecasting attempts to find the most probable course of events, or perhaps a range of probabilities. But the entrepreneurial problem is to find the unique event that will change the possibilities, for the entrepreneurial universe is not a physical but a value universe. Indeed the central entrepreneurial contribution and the one which alone is rewarded with a profit is to bring about the unique event, the innovation that changes the probabilities.”
Peter Drucker
This comes from a longer essay on this topic in the book Technology, Management and Society, p 110-112. This was originally published in 1959 in the journal Management Science (available on JSTOR): Drucker, Peter F. (1959): Long-Range Planning: Challenge to Management Science. Management Science 5(3): 238-249.
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“Strategy is a series of questions that lead to answers. It’s not a map—it’s a compass.”
Seth Godin
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“Evolution is a blind giant who rolls a snowball down a hill. The ball is made of flakes–circumstances. They contribute to the mass without knowing it. They adhere without intention, and without foreseeing what is to result. When they see the result they marvel at the monster ball and wonder how the contriving of it came to be originally thought out and planned. Whereas there was no such planning, there was only a law: the ball once started, all the circumstances that happened to lie in its path would help to build it, in spite of themselves.”
Mark Twain in “The Secret History of Eddypus”
An alternate perspective on vision, although in some sense he is describing the dominant eigenvector for a system: if you can design the system it will iterate to achieve the results you want.
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“There is nothing wrong in saying, “I don’t know.”
Don Valentine (quoted in “DTV” by Michael Moritz)
Admitting your ignorance can be the beginning of wisdom. It also encourages you to engage in foresight. “DTV” is a short read at 53 pages that offers a brief intimate perspective on Sequoia Capital’s founder.
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“Entrepreneurship isn’t about luck, it’s about vision, time management, creativity, determination and goals.”
Onyi Anyado
This is a good list, I like the inclusion of time management. I do believe that luck can be cultivated:
- Cultivating Luck in Business Endeavors and Relationships
- Increase Your Luck Surface Area To Get More Customers
- The Lucky And The Wise
- Entrepreneurs, Luck, and Silicon Valley
- Naval Ravikant On Avoiding Bad Luck
- Feeling Lucky Is Not A Strategy
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“A good question is never answered. It is not a bolt to be tightened into place but a seed to be planted and to bear more seed toward the hope of greening the landscape of idea.”
John Ciardi
I curated this originally in October 2012. In many ways a question may be more useful than a vision for an entrepreneur.
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“Some key inventions are business models rather than physical technology. Wheeled vehicles had existed for millennia before the brilliance of Pascal and the fluke of Baudry’s shuttle generated the idea of bus timetabling. Technological progress is of course immensely important. But our existing endowment of physical technology already holds untold thousands of applications that could transform our lives, just as Baudry’s buses transformed the lives of our ancestors.”
Samuel Hughes (@SCP_Hughes) in “The Invention of Buses“
This reminds me of an observation in “AntiFragile” by Nicholas Nassim Taleb:
“Implementation does not necessarily proceed from invention. It too requires luck and circumstances, and the wisdom to realize what you have on your hands. […] The Half-Invented. For there is a category of things that we can call half-invented, and taking the half-invented into the invented is often the real breakthrough.”
Nicholas Nassim Taleb in “AntiFragile”
I like this insight and Taleb’s quote that encapsulates it so nicely and used in in “Mike Maples on Pattern Breakers,” and quote collections in July 2020 and November 2020.
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“Solving a problem simply means representing it so as to make the solution transparent.”
Herb Simon
A good vision statement can offer a similar level of clarity.
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“Our need to illuminate everything should be done thoughtfully since some things can only be seen in the dark.”
Beston Jack Abrams
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“Leaders talk about communicating a vision as an instrument of change, but I prefer the notion of communicating an aspiration. It’s not just a picture of what could be; it is an appeal to our better selves, a call to become something more.”
Rosabeth Moss Kanter in Leader to Leader (Summer, 1999)
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“Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality.”
Warren Bennis
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“Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to fit the vision, instead we are always changing the vision.”
G. K. Chesterton
In “Logic of Chance” (1866) John Venn writes about a man who drew a target circle around a bullet hole in a barn door to impress visitors.
“A man once pointed to a small target chalked upon a door, the target having a bullet hole through the center of it, and surprised some spectators by declaring that he had fired that shot from an old fowling-piece at a distance of a hundred yards, His statement was true enough, but he suppressed a rather important fact. The shot had really been aimed in a general way at the barn-door, and had hit it; the target was afterwards chalked round the spot where the bullet struck.”
John Venn “Logic of Chance” (1866)
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“Strategic planning does not deal with future decisions. It deals with the futurity of present decisions. Decisions only exist in the present. The questions that faces the strategic decision-maker is not what his organization should do tomorrow. It is, ‘What do we have to do today to be ready for an uncertain tomorrow?‘ The question is not what will happen in the future. It is, ‘What futurity do we have to build into our present thinking and doing, what time spans do we have to consider, and how do we use this information to make a rational decision now?'”
Peter Drucker in Management: Tasks, Practices, Responsibilities (1974)
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Image source: 123rf.com/profile_peshkov and 123rf.com/profile_alstanova