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.

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.

Nico’s anger turned as cold and dark as his blade. He’d been morphed into a few plants himself, and he didn’t appreciate it. He hated people like Bryce Lawrence, who inflicted pain just for fun.

Conscience is the detective that watches the direction of our steps and decries every conscious transgression.

My first wish is to see this plague of mankind, war, banished from the earth.

Sadly, it's much easier to create a desert than a forest.

Once when I went over my work with my Washington University professor, the late great Stanley Elkin, he pointed to a passage of mine and said: Stop vamping. It has remained a caution.

I never have anything to talk about.

A man with an invention on which he has spent his life, but has no means to get it developed for the good of humanity - or even patented for himself - must feel the pinch of poverty very acutely.

I was writing the Paraguay book, a Paragauyan told me that only five thousand people in Paraguay read.

It’s an odd thing, happiness. Some people take happiness from gold. Or black pearls. And some of us, far more fortunate, take their happiness from periwinkles.

Photography means releasing oneself from one type of gravity and placing oneself in a space where a different force is trying to move you.