Jeff Bezos Quotes

Do something you're very passionate about, and don't try to chase what is kind of the "hot passion" of the day.

Seek instant gratification - or the elusive promise of it - and chances are you'll find a crowd there ahead of you.

I'm skeptical of any mission that has advertisers at its centerpiece.

If you're long-term oriented, customer interests and shareholder interests are aligned.

Our point of view is we will sell more if we help people make purchasing decisions.

If you invent frequently and are willing to fail, then you never get to that point where you really need to bet the whole company.

In the old world, you devoted 30% of your time to building a great service and 70% of your time to shouting about it. In the new world, that inverts

My view is there's no bad time to innovate.

The world is littered with corpses that predicted technology in a particular arena was done. If there's another gigantic step change out there, we don't yet know what it is.

Lowering prices is easy. Being able to afford to lower prices is hard.

If you have a business model that relies on customers being misinformed, you better start working on changing your business model.

Your margin is my opportunity.

People who were right a lot of the time were people who often changed their minds.

Cultures aren’t so much planned as they evolve from that early set of people.

I believe you have to be willing to be misunderstood if you're going to innovate.

To get something new done you have to be stubborn and focused, to the point that others might find unreasonable.

You can work long, hard, or smart, but at Amazon.com you can’t choose two out of three.

Maintain a firm grasp of the obvious at all times.

Are you lazy or just incompetent?

I have a strongly held belief that one of the reasons that Amazon has been successful is because we do not obsess over competitors. Instead we obsess over customers.

I love my life. I love being an inventor.

I'm going to go do this crazy thing. I'm going to start this company selling books online.

Our vision is every book ever printed in any language [fetched and viewable on our eBook Kindle device] in under 60 seconds.

I think if people read more, that is a better world.

Am I going to regret leaving Wall Street? No. Will I regret missing the beginning of the Internet? Yes.

You don't chose your passion, your passion choses you

The book is not really the container for the book. The book itself is the narrative. It's the thing that people create.

Invention requires a long-term willingness to be misunderstood.

I think that, ah, I'm a very goofy sort of person in many ways.

We were hoping to build a small profitable company; and of course, what we've done is build a large, unprofitable company.

For many people, extended reading sessions on an LCD display cause eyestrain.

Good ideas will always get funded, so that's not going to be a problem. But you will see that it will be harder and harder for bad ideas to get funded.

People forget already how much utility they get out of the Internet - how much utility they get out of e-mail, how much utility they get out of even simple things like brochureware online.

We've got thousands of investors counting on us. And we're a team of thousands of employees all counting on each other. That's fun.

Strip malls are history.

We also have no incentive compensation of any kind. And the reason we don’t is because it is detrimental to teamwork.

People loved their horses, too. But you don't keep riding your horse to work just because you love it.

It's perfectly healthy-encouraged, even- to have an idea tomorrow that contradicted your idea today

Read the Declaration of Independence to your children as a tradition every Fourth of July. Make sure they understand why the word "pursuit" precedes the word "happiness."

The people who are right a lot often change their minds.

What characteristics do I look for when hiring somebody? That's one of the questions I ask when interviewing. I want to know what kind of people they would hire.

People don't want gadgets, they want services.

We are pioneers and the history of pioneers is not that good.

Not the outcome any of us wanted.

Will you be clever at the expense of others, or will you be kind?

We're building a unique global platform...In the last 18 months we found that sellers and partners are interested in complementing their online and offline businesses with Amazon's platform

Infrastructure web services had to happen.

Mediocre theoretical physicists make no progress. They spend all their time understanding other people's progress.

You know, we love stories and we love narrative; we love to get lost in an author's world.

The death knell for any enterprise is to glorify the past -- no matter how good it was.