Quotes for Entrepreneurs curated in September 2026 from a variety of sources on a theme of character and ability
Quotes for Entrepreneurs Curated In September 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 collect them in a blog post that adds commentary and may contain a longer passage from the same source for context.
My theme for the September 2026 “Quotes for Entrepreneurs” is character and ability, personal qualities that both benefit from ongoing cultivation.
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“Character is simply habit long continued”
Plutarch in “On Education“
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“Success isn’t finding the one trick or secret nobody knows. It’s doing the boring things everyone knows about but are too undisciplined to do. Get good at being boring.”
Mark Manson in a Sep-1 tweet
In “Pick Boring Or Grinding Over Losing Money” I suggested that, “The sad reality is that a business cannot be fun, educational, and profitable all at once. Pick boring or grinding over losing money.”
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“Character consists of what you do on the third and fourth tries.”
James Michener in Chesapeake
h/t WIST; more context
“For a woman to achieve her capabilities she must have an example. She cannot discover the truth by herself.”
“What example had you?”
“William Shakespeare.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that I was an ugly child–had no young men pursuing me–and in God’s grimness I could do nothing but read. I read all of that heavy book you see on the table near the window, and I warrant it hasn’t been opened since I left.”
“I couldn’t understand Shakespeare,” Mark said honestly.
“Nor could I…the first two times. Character consists of what you do on the third and fourth tries.”
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“Talent is a gift, but character is a choice.”
John C. Maxwell in “21 Indispensable Qualities of a Leader” (section heading)
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“Character–the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life– is the source from which self-respect springs. Self-respect is something that our grandparents, whether or not they had it, knew all about. They had instilled in them, young, a certain discipline, the sense that one lives by doing things one does not particularly want to do, by putting fears and doubts to one side, by weighing immediate comforts against the possibility of larger, even intangible, comforts.”
Joan Didion in On Self-Respect
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“It’s good to do uncomfortable things. It’s weight training for life.”
Anne Lamott in Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith
I originally curated this in December 2015.
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“Occasions of adversity best discover how great virtue or strength each one hath. For occasions do not make a man frail, but they show what he is.”
Thomas à Kempis in “The Imitation of Christ” (c. 1418)
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“There is only one proof of ability—action.”
Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, in Aphorisms (1880–93)
Originally curated in February 2025. Sometimes the ability to be patient, to wait until the time is ripe, is also proof of ability or character. Benjamin Disraeli observed: “Next to knowing when to seize an opportunity, the most important thing in life is to know when to forego an advantage.”
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“People’s beliefs about their abilities have a profound effect on those abilities. Ability is not a fixed property; there is a huge variability in how you perform. People who have a sense of self-efficacy bounce back from failures; they approach things in terms of how to handle them rather than worrying about what can go wrong.”
Albert Bandura in “Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control” (1997)
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“It all goes so fast, and character makes the difference when it’s close.”
Jesse Owens
quoted in Jesse Owens, Champion Athlete (1990) by Tony Gentry
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“Character is a strange blending of flinty strength and pliable warmth.”
Robert H. Shaffer
I originally curated this in November 2023, noting: “To survive and manage the rich variety of situations we encounter in this life you need a range of strategies you can employ effectively. I like Shaffer’s suggestion that we need to combine hard strength with encouraging support as the situation requires. When you find yourself over your head or in a survival situation you will need to be able to try different approaches to persevere.”
It reminds me of this quote by Edna O’Brien I curated in November-2010 and January-2012:
“When anyone asks me about the Irish character, I say look at the trees. Maimed, stark, and misshapen, but ferociously tenacious.”
Edna O’Brien
I think this matches the character of many successful entrepreneurs who are not Irish as well.
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“Judge of your natural character by what you do in your dreams.
If you yield to temptation there, I am afraid you will, awake.
If you are a coward then, I jalouse of your courage by day.
Ralph Waldo Emerson in journal entry for “Naples March 12, 1833“
Jalouse is an old Scottish verb meaning to suspect or surmise. I am not sure that Emerson is accurate about dreams: may be as much our exploring implications of potential actions and exploring the impossible to find the limits of the possible.
“The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.”
Arthur C. Clarke in “Profiles of the Future” (1962)
This was reworked by Clarke in a 1972 talk “Report on Planet Three and Other Speculations” as “Clarke’s Second Law: The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible.” h/t Garson O’Toole (Quote Investigator) in “Limits” for history of Clarke’s Second Law.
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“Man is like a card-player who receives from Nature his cards—his disposition, his circumstances, the strength or weakness of his will, of his mind, and of his body. The game of life is one of blended chance and skill. The best player will be defeated if he has hopelessly bad cards, but in the long run the skill of the player will not fail to tell. The power of man over his character bears much resemblance to his power over his body. Men come into the world with bodies very unequal in their health and strength; with hereditary dispositions to disease; with organs varying greatly in their normal condition. At the same time a temperate or intemperate life, skillful or unskillful regimen, physical exercises well adapted to strengthen the weaker parts, physical apathy, vicious indulgence, misdirected or excessive effort, will all in their different ways alter his bodily condition and increase or diminish his chances of disease and premature death. The power of will over character is, however, stronger, or, at least, wider than its power over the body. There are organs which lie wholly beyond its influence; there are diseases over which it can exercise no possible influence, but there is no part of our moral constitution which we cannot in some degree influence or modify.”
William Edward Hartpole Lecky in “The Map of Life: Conduct and Character” (1900)
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“Character is Destiny”
Heraclitus
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“People speak of Hope as this delicate, ephemeral thing made of whispers and spider webs. She is not. Hope has dirt on her face, blood on her knuckles, the grit of the cobblestones in her hair, and she just spat out a tooth as she rises for another go.”
Matthew (@CrowsFault) Mar-10-2022 tweet
I like this perspective on hope as an aspect of a muscular faith. It reminds me of James 1:17: “Every good endowment and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.” I originally curated this in November 2022.
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“Character is what emerges from all the little things you were too busy to do yesterday, but did anyway.”
Mignon McLaughlin in “The Second Neurotic’s Notebook” [Archive.org]
I like this quote and believe it is especially good advice for bootstrappers who are always pressed for time since they have less money to trade for time, at least in the early going. I have curated it twice before, first in December 2009 and again in November 2014. If I am still above ground and blogging in the 2030s I will doubtless find one or two more uses for it. I like a lot of McLaughlin’s aphorisms.
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“The acquisition of one sort of ability often makes that of another unlikely, if not impossible…To take the gifts one does have to concentrate one’s strength upon their development to disallow distractions–none of these is an easy task.”
Joseph Epstein in “Ambition: The Secret Passion” (1980)
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“There are many rare abilities in the world, which Fortune never brings to light.”
Thomas Fuller in Gnomologia
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“A special ability means a heavy expenditure of energy in a particular direction, with a consequent drain from some other side of life.”
Carl Jung
I am not sure I believe this completely, but it’s certainly the case that you cannot “ride out in all directions at once” and get good at everything at the same time.
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“The brain grows to the exact modes in which it has been exercised. Man is, par excellence, the educable animal.”
William James “Principles of Psychology” 1890
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“The world is created by fewer men than we often realize, and they tend to be more extraordinary than we’d like to acknowledge. Ground floor, it’s hard to replace people like this.”
Mike Solana in Flexport: Return of the King (Sep 13, 2023)
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“Uncertainty is not a property of the world, but of our relationship with the world”
David Spiegelhalter in “The Art of Uncertainty”
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“I always keep a bottle of chilled champagne on hand, just waiting for something to celebrate. And when I visited a friend after a sad event, I took them a bottle and told them to set it aside for when good things happened in the future, because they would. And, later, they did and they even called me to tell me they drank it. That’s faith in the future, and so far it’s worked out for me pretty well.”
Glenn Reynolds in A Tale of Two Centuries
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Image Credit: Moon with a wisp of cloud by Steve Houston. Used with Permission.