The most important single thing is to focus obsessively on the customer. Our goal is to be earth's most customer-centric company.

A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well.

The common question that gets asked in business is, why? That’s a good question, but an equally valid question is, why not?

We can't be in survival mode. We have to be in growth mode.

What we want to be is something completely new. There is no physical analog for what Amazon.com is becoming.

One of the huge mistakes people make is that they try to force an interest on themselves. You don't choose your passions; your passions choose you.

If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.

It's hard to find things that won't sell online.

Everything you are comes from your choices.

A company shouldn't get addicted to being shiny, because shiny doesn't last.

We've had three big ideas at Amazon that we've stuck with for 18 years, and thy're the reason we're successful: Put the customer first. Invent. And be patient.

Today we are even manipulating the DNA that makes us possible in the first place—a case of evolution evolving new ways to evolve.

Death itself is too big to take in, she already sees that; the loss comes at you instead in an infinite number of small installments that can never be paid off.

Poetry is the morning dream of great minds.

I'm trying to move an aircraft carrier here, I'm not just steering the speedboat.

Your absence of mind we have borne, till your presence of body came to be called in question by it.

Most people are afraid of change, but if you look at it as something you can always count on, then it can be a comfort.

I don't need a director who's 'good with actors.'...A master manipulator is heaven.

A doctor today would never prescribe the treatments my grandfather used in the Confederate Army, but a minister says pretty much the same thing today that a minister would have said back then.

It's been dawning on me slowly that for the past 35 years I have been cast against type, and I'm finally getting to do what I really wanted to do.

Death is the black backing on the mirror that allows us to see anything at all.