A collection of quotes for entrepreneurs curated in April 2025 around a theme of passion, energy, and enthusiasm
Quotes For Entrepreneurs Curated in April 2025
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. Please enter your E-mail address if you would like to have new blog posts sent to you.
My theme for this month’s “Quotes for Entrepreneurs” is passion, energy, and enthusiasm.
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Parveen Garg in his LinkedIn tagline
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“Energy makes more fortunes than prudence.”
Vauvenargues in Maxims #181
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“When evaluating options, we naturally focus on fixing weaknesses. But developing a 10x strength is far more valuable than shifting a weakness to neutral. This is true for products, companies, and people.”
Jason Cohen (@SmartBear)
Peter Drucker also talks about focusing on opportunities over solving problems.
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“Until I understand where I am, I can’t get to where I am going. This is the value of a compass when we are out walking or hiking and need to know we’re going in the right direction. But we also have an internal North Star. It’s that little nudge that tells us if we are on the right path to fulfilling our potential, or on the wrong path wasting energy traveling somewhere we don’t need to go. So my advice to you is, pull out that compass every once in a while and make sure you are navigating in the right direction on your journey.”
John C. Maxwell
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“To do something new, you need a vision, a perspective, a North Star to aim for, and the passionate belief you’ll reach it.”
Steve Case (@SteveCase)
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“They who lack talent expect things to happen without effort. They ascribe failure to a lack of inspiration or ability, or to misfortune, rather than to insufficient application. At the core of every true talent there is an awareness of the difficulties inherent in any achievement, and the confidence that by persistence and patience something worthwhile will be realized. Thus talent is a species of vigor.”
Eric Hoffer in “Reflections on the Human Condition” [Archive.org]
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“We must learn to love life without ever trusting it.”
attributed to G. K. Chesterton
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“If Aldous Huxley had known about endlessly scrolling short videos from a handheld device, he would have made it the preferred media interface of his “Brave New World.”
He wisely understood—unlike Orwell or Bradbury—that ruling elites don’t need censorship and book-burning if they can convince people to voluntarily abandon literacy.”
Be careful of your passions and enthusiasms, they can lead you astray.
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“You have many habits that weaken you. The secret of change is to focus all your energy not on fighting the old, but on building the new.”
Dan Millman in “The Way of the Peaceful Warrior“
h/t Quote Investigator; this reminds me of two quotes by Buckminster Fuller: “don’t fight forces use them,” and
“You can’t change anything by fighting or resisting it. You change something by making it obsolete through superior methods.”
Buckminster Fuller in a 1983 interview with Mike Vance, quoted in Vance’s “Think Out of the Box” (1995)
Mike Vance offers a slightly different phrasing of the same concept in the book: “You never change anything by fighting it; you change things by making them obsolete through superior technology.” I had the opportunity to hear Vance speak in 1992, and it was memorable; I had never heard of him, and he gave a keynote at an engineering offsite for Viewlogic, a key vendor for Cisco, when I was an engineering manager there. I had been invited to take part in some joint planning. It was a high-energy presentation packed with humor and many insights.
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“I always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter. With the laugh comes the tears and in developing motion pictures or television shows, you must combine all the facts of life — drama, pathos and humor.”
Walt Disney
Quoted in “How to Be Like Walt : Capturing the Magic Every Day of Your Life” (2004) by Pat Williams
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“Grace is the outcome of inward harmony.”
Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
Harmony, whether inward or among team members, leads to economy of effort. There is a risk that ignoring contradictory evidence or avoiding a full and frank exchange of views can lead to “premature harmony.” But compromise after dialog and deliberation–internal or at a team-level–is essential to effective timely action. Eisenhower wrote the “failure memo” accepting full responsibility for a potential debacle at Normandy. I originally curated the following two quotes in Sep-2021:
“Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that Bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.”
Dwight Eisenhower in a letter drafted “In Case of Failure” for the D-Day landings
This primary source comes from the Collection DDE-EPRE: Eisenhower, Dwight D: Papers, Pre-Presidential National Archives Identifier: 186470 Transcript from DOCSTeach: “In Case of Failure 6/5/1944”
One of the leadership lessons offered in B.V. Jagdeesh on “Startup Leadership Lessons Learned” was “Prepare Two Speeches.” His tenure at NetScalar saw the company narrowly avoid shutdown and go on to establish a new paradigm for Internet connectivity management. He had to prepare two speeches for the employees, one where he announced that the company was getting shut down, and one where they announced new round of funding (from Sequoia as it turns out). He was able to give the second speech and returned 8x to Sequoia when Citrix acquired NetScalar two and half years later.
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“Leadership is the ability to establish standards and manage a creative climate where people are self-motivated toward the mastery of long-term constructive goals, in a participatory environment of mutual respect, compatible with personal values.”
Mike Vance
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Three quotes by William Feather related to energy and enthusiasm:
- “Improvement of one’s economic position is helped more by cool persistence than by hot enthusiasm.”
- “Wealth flows from energy and ideas.”
- “The reward of energy, enterprise and thrift is taxes.”
I am big fan of William Feather and have blogged about him several times:
- William Feather’s “The Business of Life”
- More from William Feather’s “The Business of Life”
- Recipes for Longevity in Mutual Improvement Clubs
- William Feather on “Perseverance Rewarded”
- William Feather on “Dead Business”
- Building, Borrowing, and Keeping Trust
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“The default state of the world is to stay the way it is, which means the default state of a startup is failure.”
Chris Dixon in ‘The Default State of a Startup is Failure“
You cannot stand still. This reminds me of a quote by Zig Ziglar I curated in December 2015
“You don’t drown by falling in water; you only drown if you stay there.”
Zig Ziglar
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“An ant on the move does more than a dozing ox.”
Mexican Proverb
h/t Charlie Gilkey in “Start Finishing”
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“Life without industry is guilt; and industry without art is brutality.”
John Ruskin in “Lectures on Art” (1870)
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“Energy and persistence conquer all things.”
Ben Franklin
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“We crave for new sensations but soon become indifferent to them. The wonders of yesterday are today common occurrences.”
Nikola Tesla My Inventions
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“A man may keep very busy indeed without doing any thinking at all, and the easy course—the course of least resistance—is to keep so busy that there will be no time left over for thought.”
Harvey Firestone in “Men and Rubber“
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“A different world cannot be built by indifferent people.”
Peter Marshall
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“Before jumping into a very competitive game I think you should look at the winners of that game and decide if you want to be like them first.”
Sherry Ning
The focus for this collection of quotes is on energy and enthusiasm because they are essential to entrepreneurial success. But there are significant risks of getting carried away with your enthusiasm and this quote by Sherry Ning and William Stafford look at different aspects of this.
You may win a war you are sorry to have started.
William Stafford in Sound of the Ax: Aphorisms by William Stafford
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“Ability is important–dependability is critical.”
Zig Ziglar “See You at the Top“
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“You build on failure. You use it as a stepping stone. Close the door on the past. You don’t try to forget the mistakes, but you don’t dwell on it. You don’t let it have any of your energy, or any of your time, or any of your space.”
Johnny Cash
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Hobbes: What are you doing?
Calvin: Looking for frogs.
Hobbes: How come?
Calvin: I must obey the inscrutable exhortations of my soul.
Hobbes: Ah. But of course.
Calvin: My mandate also includes weird bugs.
Bill Watterson in ‘Calvin and Hobbes”
I have days like this, where I wander from one in inspired deep into one topic to another. It used to be TV Tropes, Technovelgy, and Wikipedia were my guidebooks. Now Grok and ChatGPT are my boon companions. Here some recent inscrutable exhortations from my soul that I followed:
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- Spaceward Ho! R&D model equations and mechanics
- N-Modular redundancy in aerospace systems
- Difference between trial and tribulation
- using this statement by Ted Chiang from a 2010 Boing Boing interview for exploring magicians vs. engineers and whether entrepreneurs are born or can be made.”
“In a story where only a handful of characters are able to turn lead into gold, there’s the implication that there’s something special about those individuals. The laws of the universe take into account some special property that only certain individuals have. By contrast, if you have a story in which turning lead into gold is an industrial process, something that can be done on a mass scale and can be done cheaply, then you’re implying that the laws of the universe apply equally to everybody; they work the same even for machines in unmanned factories. In one case I’d say the phenomenon is magic, while in the other I’d say it’s science.” - How our tools and applications shape our thinking. What questions has Google trained us not to ask? Collaborating over email vs. in a Google Doc vs. in a Google Sheet vs. chat.
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“Law of Relative Productivity Growth: In the medium to long run, labor moves from sectors where productivity is rising faster than demand to where demand is rising faster than productivity.”
Arnold Kling in “Trade Myths that Refuse to Die”
Kling observed that this follows from Baumol’s Cost Disease.
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“In some instances, AI really is a tool. But the larger reality is a tsunami of AI slop polluting human culture—and spread deceptively in destructive ways for the benefit of a billionaire technocracy.”
Ted Gioia (@TedGioia) in “I Get Into Dogfights on Social Media“
When Gioia says dogfights he makes his personal code of ethics clear up front:
“Let me say upfront that I never start fights online. Not even once. You can look at my social media timelines for the last decade or more—I’ve never launched a single attack.
- I don’t respond to online articles with any criticisms or negative comments. (However, I will share words of praise if I like the author’s work.)
- I don’t respond to other people’s social media posts with angry reactions—or pushback of any kind.
- I never show up uninvited on anyone’s timeline with an attack or insult or barb or rebuttal.
- I try to operate on these platforms with a peaceful philosophy of live-and-let-live.
So I don’t start fights. But I’m not totally innocent. I believe that different rules apply if somebody else starts punching—and I take a few hits.”
Ted Gioia (@TedGioia) in “I Get Into Dogfights on Social Media“
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“Don’t wait for inspiration. It comes while working.”
Henri Matisse
This is very similar to
” Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.”
Pablo Picasso
Neither are well sourced but they express a common fundamental truth.