230+ Inspirational Entrepreneur Quotes for digital entrepreneurs

The rapid growth of the internet has led to an explosion of ways that people can make money online. Many people are now earning a decent living as bloggers, writers, YouTubers, digital marketers, social media influencers, startup founders, or e-commerce store owners.

Online businesses come with many advantages and are less risky than traditional brick-and-mortar businesses. This makes it easier for people to start and run successful businesses.

Nevertheless, digital entrepreneurs still face many challenges that other traditional entrepreneurs face.

If you are a digital entrepreneur or intend to start an online business soon, this article is for you. You will learn through the words of some of the most successful people.

The 230+ quotes in this article will cover many of the situations and challenges you are likely to encounter as you run your business. These words of inspiration and comfort will guide you as you build your business.

Some of the topics that these quotes will cover include:

• How you can follow your passion the right way.
• How you can deal with the challenges of running a business.
• How to be more productive in your work.

1. Quotes About Following Your Passion

1. This is the real secret of life – to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play. – Alan Watts, The Real Secret of Life

2. Draw the art you want to see, start the business you want to run, play the music you want to hear, write the books you want to read, build the products you want to use- do the work you want to see done. –  Austin Kleon, Steal Like an Artist

3. Instead of wondering when your next vacation is, maybe you should set up a life you don’t need to escape from. – Seth Godin, Tribes

Build your own dreams, or someone else will hire you to build theirs – Farrah Gray

4. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. – Steve Jobs, Stanford Commencement address, 2005

5. Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing. – Theodore Roosevelt, State Agricultural Association Address, 1903

6. To labor in the arts for any reason other than love is prostitution. –  Steven Pressfield, The War of Art

7. Put yourself where your strengths can produce results. – Peter F. Drucker, Managing Oneself

8. Know yourself. Choose the right medium, choose the right topic, create awesome content, and you can make a lot of money being happy. –  Gary Vaynerchuk, Crush It!

9. Don’t let making a living prevent you from making a life. – John Wooden, Wooden

10. A man’s true delight is to do the things he was made for. – Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

2. Quotes To Motivate You to Make Money

1. Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art. – Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol

2. Like Warren, I had a considerable passion to get rich. Not because I wanted Ferraris -I wanted the independence. I desperately wanted it. – Charlie Munger talking about Warren Buffet in Damn Right!

3. It should feel genuinely good to earn income from your blog- you should be driven by a healthy ambition to succeed. If your blog provides genuine value, you fully deserve to earn income from it. – Steve Pavlina, How to Make Money from Your Blog, 2006

4. Thinking first of money instead of work brings on fear of failure and this fear blocks every avenue of business -it makes a man afraid of competition, of changing his methods, or of doing anything which might change his condition. – Henry Ford, My Life and Work

5. Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort. -Franklin D. Roosevelt, Inaugural Address 1933

6. You can only become truly accomplished at something you love. Don’t make money your goal. Instead pursue the things you love doing and then do them so well that people can’t take their eyes off of you. – Maya Angelou, Facebook Post, June 2013

7. Business must be run at a profit, else it will die. But when any one attempts to run a business solely for profit and thinks not at all of the service to the community, then also the business must die, for it no longer has a reason for existence. – Henry Ford, Today and Tomorrow

Money often costs too much – Ralph Waldo Emerson

8. I neither wish nor intend to amass a personal fortune. Money- or rather the lack of it to carry out my ideas – may worry me, but it does not excite me. Ideas excite me. – Walt Disney, The Quotable Disney

9. It is good to have money and the things that money can buy, but it’s good too, to check up once in a while and make sure you haven’t lost the things money can’t buy. – George Horace Lorimer, Old Gorgon Graham

10. You reach a point where you don’t work for money. – Walt Disney, The Quotable Disney

3. Procrastination Quotes to Get You to Take Action

1. Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. –  H. Jackson Brown Jr., P.S. I Love You

2. My advice is, never do to-morrow what you can do today. Procrastination is the thief of time. – Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

3. The most pernicious aspect of procrastination is that it can become a habit. We don’t just put off our lives today; we put them off till our deathbed. – Steven Pressfield, The War of Art

4. Nothing…will ever be attempted, if all possible objections must be first overcome. -Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas (1759)

5. The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing. – Walt Disney, The Quotable Disney

How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world. – Anne Frank

6. To finish first you have to first finish. – Charlie Munger, quoted in Damn Right!

7. A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step. -Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

8. The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones. – Confucius, The Analects

9. Ideas are worthless. Execution is everything. – Rand Fishkin, Lost and Founder

10. If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late. – Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn, 2017

4. Personal Growth Quotes for Self-Transformation

1. What you get by reaching your goals is not nearly as important as what you become by reaching them. – Zig Ziglar, See You At The Top

2. Don’t just let your business or your job make something for you; let it make something of you. – Jim Rohn, Treasury of Quotes

3. You are essentially who you create yourself to be and all that occurs in your life is the result of your own making. – Stephen Richards, Think Your way to Success

4. The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be. – Nike Ad, 1999

5. If you don’t try to create the future you want, you must endure the future you get. – John C. Maxwell, The 15 Invaluable Laws Of Growth

No one can construct for you the bridge upon which precisely you must cross the stream of life, no one but you yourself alone. – Friedrich Nietzsche

6. As the physically weak man can make himself strong by careful and patient training, so the man of weak thoughts can make them strong by exercising himself in right thinking. – James Allen, As a Man Thinketh

7. You cannot dream yourself into a character: you must hammer and forge yourself into one. –  James Anthony Froude, The Nemesis of Faith

8. No one improves by accident. Personal growth doesn’t just happen on its own. And once you’re done with your formal education, you must take complete ownership of the growth process, because nobody else will do it for you. – John C. Maxwell, The 15 Invaluable Laws Of Growth

9. A man, as a general rule, owes very little to what he is born with -a man is what he makes of himself. – Alexander Graham Bell, How They Succeeded, 1901

10. What greater wealth is there than to own your life and to spend it on growing? Every living thing must grow. It can’t stand still. It must grow or perish. – Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

5. Insightful Quotes on Making Mistakes

1. We make our discoveries through our mistakes: we watch one another’s success: and where there is freedom to experiment there is hope to improve. – Arthur Quiller-Couch, On The Art of Reading

2. Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better. – Maya Angelou, Twitter, 2018

3. The fool strikes. The wise man smiles, and watches, and learns. Then strikes. – Joe Abercrombie, Half a King

4. The secret of being wrong isn’t to avoid being wrong. The secret is being willing to be wrong. The secret is realizing that wrong isn’t fatal. – Seth Godin, Tribes

The only man who never makes a mistake is the man who never does anything. – Theodore Roosevelt

5. You don’t learn to walk by following rules, you learn by doing and by falling over. – Richard Branson, Virgin.com

6. There is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly. – Theodore Roosevelt, Man in the Arena Speech, 1910

7. If you want to grow, you need to get over any fear you may have of making mistakes. – John C. Maxwell, The 15 Invaluable Laws of Growth

8. The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one. – Elbert Hubbard, The Note Book of Elbert Hubbard, 1927

9. Attention and activity lead to mistakes as well as to successes; but a life spent in making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing. – George Bernard Shaw, The Doctor’s Dilemma, 1911

10. If you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You’re doing things you’ve never done before, and more importantly, you’re Doing Something. –Neil Gaiman, Neil Gaiman Blog, 2020

6. Encouraging Quotes on Failure and Defeat

1. Failure is only the opportunity to begin again more intelligently. – Henry Ford, My Life and Work

2. There is no failure except in no longer trying. – Elbert Hubbard, American Bible

3. There is no disgrace in honest failure; there is disgrace in fearing to fail. What is past is useful only as it suggests ways and means for progress. – Henry Ford, My Life and Work

4. I think failure is bad. I don’t think it’s good, but if something is important enough then you do it even though the risk of failure is high. – Elon Musk, CHM revolutionaries interview

5. In the struggle of life it is always possible to turn one kind of defeat into another kind of victory. – W. L. Sheldon, What to Believe

Failure is an event, not a person. Yesterday ended last night. – Zig Ziglar

6. The only time you fail is when you fall down and stay down. – Stephen Richards, Cosmic Ordering

7. My greatest teacher has been simply trying things … not to succeed, but to learn. In that context, there is no failure. – Brian Clark, Copyblogger

8. Winners quit fast, quit often, and quit without guilt. – Seth Godin, The Dip

9. You may not realize it when it happens, but a kick in the teeth may be the best thing in the world for you. – Walt Disney, The Quotable Walt Disney

10. No man is defeated without until he has first been defeated within. – Eleanor Roosevelt, You Learn by Living

11. It is good to have a failure while you’re young because it teaches you so much. – Walt Disney, The Quotable Walt Disney

12. Fail early, fail often, but always fail forward – John Maxwell, Failing Forward

7. Powerful Quotes on Learning and Self-Education

1. The future belongs to those who learn more skills and combine them in creative ways. – Robert Greene, Mastery

2. Higher intelligence is not necessarily something you’re born with or genetically predisposed toward. In fact, most instances of above-the-ordinary intelligences are usually acquired through superior learning techniques. – James Morcan, Genius Intelligence

3. An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest. – Benjamin Franklin, The Way to Wealth

4. If you don’t know, the thing to do is not to get scared, but to learn. – Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

5. Don’t let your learning lead to knowledge. Let your learning lead to action. – Jim Rohn, Facebook Post, 2017

6. Forget the rules, and learn from first-hand experience instead. There’s so much more to be gained from not knowing how to do things the ‘correct’ way, and learning to do them your own way. – Richard Branson, Virgin.com

7. Never begrudge the money you spend on your own education. – Jim Rohn, Treasury of Quotes

8. If a craftsman wants to do good work, he must first sharpen his tools. – Confucius, The Analects

Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune. – Jim Rohn

9. A man’s real education begins after he has left school. True education is gained through the discipline of life. – Henry Ford, My Life and Work

10. Of all the important pieces of self-knowledge, understanding how you learn is the easiest to acquire. – Peter F. Drucker, Managing Oneself

11. Right now, and for the first time ever, a passionate and committed individual has access to the technology, minds, and capital required to take on any challenge. – Peter H. Diamandis, Bold

8. Quotes To Motivate You to Make an Impact

1. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact. And that is everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it-you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. –Steve Jobs, Santa Clara Valley Historical Association Interview, 1994

2. A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life depend on the labours of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving. – Albert Einstein, The World As I See It

3. I used to think that your calling was about doing something good in this world. Now I understand it’s about becoming someone good—and letting that goodness impact the world around you. – Jeff Goins, The Art of Work

4. Life is too short to do what doesn’t matter, to waste your time on things that don’t amount to much. What we all want is to know our time on earth has meant something. We can distract ourselves with pleasure for only so long before beginning to wonder what the point is.– Jeff Goins, The Art of Work

5. Here’s a tip about impact – your impact is measured not but what you do, but by what happens to other people when you do it. – John Jantsch, 2017 What I Want for You Most in 2017

What counts in life is not the mere fact that we have lived. It is what difference we have made to the lives of others that will determine the significance of the life we lead. – Nelson Mandela

6. I want to be useful or bring enjoyment to all people, even those I’ve never met. I want to go on living even after my death! – Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl

7. Creative work is not a selfish act or a bid for attention on the part of the actor. It’s a gift to the world and every being in it. Don’t cheat us of your contribution. Give us what you’ve got. –Steven Pressfield, The War of Art

8. Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, “What are you doing for others?” – Martin Luther King Jr., Strength to Love, 1963

9. I will not follow where the path may lead, but I will go where there is no path, and I will leave a trail. – Muriel Strode, Wind-Wafted Flowers, 1903

10. Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there. –  Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, 1953

9. Inspiring Quotes on Providing Value

1. We get paid for bringing value to the marketplace. It takes time to bring value to the marketplace, but we get paid for the value, not for the time. – Jim Rohn, Treasury of Quotes

2. Think more about what people really want than about what you think they need. – Chris Guillebeau, The $100 Startup

3. I find out what the world needs. Then, I go ahead and invent it. – Thomas A. Edison, quoted in American Greats (1999)

4. Value is created when a person makes something useful and shares it with the world. – Chris Guillebeau, The $100 Startup

5. You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help enough other people get what they want. – Zig Ziglar, See You at the Top

Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value. – Albert Einstein

6. Find out what people want, and find a way to give it to them. Give them the fish! – Chris Guillebeau, The $100 Startup

7. Don’t bring your need to the marketplace, bring your skill. If you don’t feel well, tell your doctor, but not the marketplace. If you need money, go to the bank, but not the marketplace. – Jim Rohn, Treasury of Quotes

8. The best way to become a billionaire is to help a billion people. – Peter Diamandis, Peter’s Laws

9. If you make your business about helping others, you’ll always have plenty of work. -Chris Guillebeau, The $100 Startup

10. Powerful Quotes on Patience and Perseverance

1. Great works are performed not by strength, but perseverance. – Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas (1759)

2. Continuous effort – not strength or intelligence – is the key to unlocking our potential. – Liane Cordes, Fitzhenry & Whiteside Book of Quotations

3. How many a man has thrown up his hands at a time when a little more effort, a little more patience, would have achieved success. – Elbert Hubbard, American Bible

4. It is not easy to find a man who can study for three years without thinking about earning a salary – Confucius, The Analects

5. Courage and perseverance have a magical talisman, before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish into air. – John Quincy Adams, Landing of Pilgrim Commemoration Oration (1802)

Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years. – Bill Gates

6. The most successful men in the end are those whose success is the result of steady accretion. – Alexander Graham Bell, How they Succeeded, 1901

7. Effective executives do not race. They set an easy pace but keep going steadily. – Peter F. Drucker, The Effective Executive

8. You do the right thing and then you do the next right thing. Over time it adds up, and the geometric potential of success is unleashed. – Gary Keller, The One Thing

9. Perseverance must have some practical end, or it does not avail the man possessing it. A person without a practical end in view becomes a crank or an idiot. Such persons fill our asylums. – Alexander Graham Bell, How they Succeeded, 1901

10. No man can be patient who has not strong passions, for patience is passion tamed. – Lyman Abbott, The Theology of an Evolutionist

11. Motivating Productivity Quotes for Getting Things Done

1. Fewer people, more focused on just a few things, could do more than a much larger team pulled in myriad directions. – Rand Fishkin, Lost and Founder

2. Extraordinary results are directly determined by how narrow you can make your focus … when you spread yourself out, you end up spread thin. – Gary Keller, The One Thing

3. Multitasking is merely the opportunity to screw up more than one thing at a time. – Gary Keller, The One Thing

4. Here’s the ironic thing about your greatness. It’s usually accomplished by focusing on a very small number of things and doing them exceptionally well – better than anyone else. – John Jantsch, 2017 What I Want for You Most in 2017

5. The key to success isn’t in all the things we do but in the handful of things we do well. – Gary Keller, The One Thing

6. There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all. -Peter Drucker, Harvard Business Review

7. It is not enough to be industrious; so are the ants. What are you industrious about? – Henry David Thoreau, Letter to Harrison Blake, 1857

8. Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work at hand. The sun’s rays do not burn until brought to a focus. – Alexander Graham Bell, How they Succeeded, 1901

9. You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. – James Clear, Atomic Habits

10. Quantity gives experience. From experience alone can quality come. – Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

12. Insightful Writing Quotes by Writers

1. Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. – Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

2. Unless you write yourself, you can’t know how wonderful it is; I always used to bemoan the fact that I couldn’t draw, but now I’m overjoyed that at least I can write. And if I don’t have the talent to write books or newspaper articles, I can always write for myself. – Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl

3. The only way to learn to write is to force yourself to produce a certain number of words on a regular basis. – William Zinsser, On Writing Well

4. Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work. – Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

5. I don’t think you have time to waste not writing because you are afraid you won’t be good at it. – Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

Writing isn’t about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it’s about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. – Stephen King

6. Communication is a skill that you can learn. It’s like riding a bicycle or typing. If you’re willing to work at it, you can rapidly improve the quality of every part of your life. – Brian Tracy, Effective Communication

7. Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That’s why it’s so hard. – David McCullough, NEC Interview

8. The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading, in order to write: a man will turn over half a library to make one book. – Samuel Johnson, The Life of Samuel Johnson

9. Don’t try to visualize the great mass audience. There is no such audience- every reader is a different person. – William Zinsser, On Writing Well

10. Writing is always and forever a learning process. One is never good enough and one never knows enough. I cannot repeat that too often. No matter how good a writer becomes, he can always be better. – Louis L’Amour, Education of a Wandering Man, 1989

13. Powerful Creativity Quotes to Spark New Ideas and Innovation

1. Ask anybody doing truly creative work, and they’ll tell you the truth: They don’t know where the good stuff comes from. They just show up to do their thing. Every day. -Austin Kleon, Steal Like an Artist

2. Boredom can be a very good thing for someone in a creative jam. –  Stephen King, On Writing

3. Every artist gets asked the question, “Where do you get your ideas?” The honest artist answers, “I steal them”. – Austin Kleon, Steal Like an Artist

4. Creativity is not about being original; it’s about learning to rearrange what has already been in a way that brings fresh insight to old material. – Jeff Goins, Real Artists Don’t Starve

5. The only art I’ll ever study is stuff that I can steal from. – David Bowie, Playboy Interview, 1976

6. Every time I run across something, it’s because I was looking for something else, which I consider real discovery. It’s when you don’t expect it that you really discover something. –Jeff Goins, Real Artists Don’t Starve

Almost anyone can think up an idea. The thing that counts is developing it into a practical product. – Henry Ford

7. Don’t delay acting on a good idea. Chances are someone else has just thought of it, too. Success comes to the one who acts first. – H. Jackson Brown, Jr., Complete Life’s Little Instruction Book

8. You’re only going to be as good as the stuff you surround yourself with. – Austin Kleon, Steal Like an Artist

9. The way to get over creative block is to simply place some constraints on yourself. It seems contradictory, but when it comes to creative work, limitations mean freedom. – Austin Kleon, Steal Like an Artist

10. Great ideas and products are often born from mediocre ones. – Rand Fishkin, Lost and Founder

11. The only worthwhile idea is the one on which you take action. – John Jantsch, The Referral Engine

12. You cannot force ideas. Successful ideas are the result of slow growth. Ideas do not reach perfection in a day, no matter how much study is put upon them. – Alexander Graham Bell, How they Succeeded

13. The creative adult is the child who has survived – Julian F. Fleron

14. Best Marketing Quotes to Inform Your Strategy

1. Market segmentation matters. It’s critical to craft your message for a specific audience. – Peter H. Diamandis, Bold

2. My definition of marketing is: “getting someone who has a need, to know, like, and trust you.” – John Jantsch, Duct Tape Marketing

3. Be brief on the logic and reason portion of your presentation. There are probably about a thousand facts about an automobile, but you don’t need them all to make a decision. About a half dozen will do. – Jim Rohn, Treasury of Quotes

4. Storytelling is how you recruit others to help you achieve your dream, it’s how you attract ideal clients, it’s how you bring excitement and meaning to the day to day work of your enterprise. – John Jantsch, 2017 What I Want for You Most in 2017

5. In the future, marketing will be like sex: Only the losers pay for it. – Chris Guillebeau, The $100 Startup

6. Effective communication is 20% what you know and 80% how you feel about what you know. – Jim Rohn, Treasury of Quotes

7. Do you really have a business without being able to reach and motivate a customer?”- John Jantsch, Duct Tape Marketing

8. When you’re an early-stage startup founder, your job is clear—find “product:market fit.”-  Rand Fishkin, Lost and Founder

9. Better understated than overstated. Let people be surprised that it was more than you promised and easier than you said. – Jim Rohn, Treasury of Quotes

10. You don’t sell what it is you claim to offer. You sell what the eventual buyers think they are going to get from your product. For instance, insurance sales folks don’t sell insurance; they sell peace of mind. – John Jantsch, Duct Tape Marketing

15. Insightful Quotes on Handling Criticism

1. A well-thought-out critique of whatever you’re doing is as valuable as gold and you should seek that from anyone you can but particularly your friends. – Elon Musk, Elon Musk Quotes

2. If you’re remarkable, it’s likely that some people won’t like you. That’s part of the definition of remarkable. Nobody gets unanimous praise–ever. The best the timid can hope for is to be unnoticed. Criticism comes to those who stand out. –  Seth Godin, Purple Cow

3. We build up tolerances to criticism, acceptance of faults, appreciation for idiosyncrasies. -Rand Fishkin, Lost and Founder

4. I’m my best and harshest critic. I know what’s good and what isn’t. – Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl

5. To avoid criticism say nothing, do nothing, be nothing. –  Elbert Hubbard, Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great

6. Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted. – Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson in His Journals

7. It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again. – Theodore Roosevelt, Man in the Arena Speech, 1910

8. Do the things that interest you and do them with all your heart. Don’t be concerned about whether people are watching you or criticizing you. The chances are that they aren’t paying any attention to you. – Eleanor Roosevelt, You Learn by Living

9. Against criticism a man can neither protest nor defend himself; he must act in spite of it, and then criticism will gradually yield to him. – Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe

16. Famous Quotes on Working Hard for Success

1. What we hope ever to do with ease, we must first learn to do with diligence. – Samuel Johnson, The Life Of Samuel Johnson

2. Brilliant men are often strikingly ineffectual; they fail to realize that the brilliant insight is not by itself achievement. They never have learned that insights become effective only through hard systematic work. –  Peter F. Drucker, The Effective Executive

3. The true measure of something’s worth is the hours it takes to acquire it. – Peter H. Diamandis, Abundance

4. Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning. Once it does, it becomes the kind of thing that makes you grab your wife around the waist and dance a jig. – Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers

5. Nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week. But if you love what you do, it (mostly) doesn’t feel like work. – Elon Musk, Twitter 2018

6. We think, mistakenly, that success is the result of the amount of time we put in at work, instead of the quality of time we put in. – Arianna Huffington, Thrive

7. I am a great believer in luck. The harder I work, the more of it I seem to have. – Coleman Cox, Straight Talk from Coleman Cox

8. Talent is a dreadfully cheap commodity, cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work and study. – Stephen King, Danse Macabre

17. Popular Quotes on the Value of Work

1. We must do our work for its own sake, not for fortune or attention or applause. – Steven Pressfield, The War of Art

2. People often ask me if I know the secret of success and if I could tell others how to make their dreams come true. My answer is, you do it by working. – Walt Disney, The Quotable Walt Disney

3. The most important thing about art is to work. Nothing else matters except sitting down every day and trying. – Steven Pressfield, The War of Art

4. We have the opportunity to get an education and make something of ourselves. We have many reasons to hope for great happiness, but we have to earn it. And that is something you can’t achieve by taking the easy ways out. Earning happiness means doing good and working, not speculating and being lazy. – Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl

5. The joy and moral stimulation of work no longer must be forgotten in the mad chase of evanescent profits. – Franklin D. Roosevelt, Inaugural Address 1933

The natural thing to do is to work – to recognize that prosperity and happiness can be obtained only through honest effort. – Henry Ford

6. Determine never to be idle. No person will have occasion to complain of the want of time, who never loses any. It is wonderful how much may be done, if we are always doing. – Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Martha Jefferson

7. Don’t work for recognition, but do work worthy of recognition. – H. Jackson Brown, Jr. – The Complete Life’s Little Instruction Book

8. Whatever your life’s work is, do it well… If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures. – Martin Luther King, Jr., A Testament of Hope

9. When a man is really at work, he needs no title. His work honours him. – Henry Ford, My Life and Work

10. You must work and do good, not be lazy and gamble, if you wish to earn happiness. Laziness may appear attractive, but work gives satisfaction. – Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl

18. Inspiring Quotes on Overcoming Fear

1. The scariest moment is always just before you start. After that, things can only get better. – Stephen King, On Writing

2. You might be scared to start. That’s natural. There’s this very real thing that runs rampant in educated people. It’s called “impostor syndrome.” It means that you feel like a phony, like you’re just winging it, that you really don’t have any idea what you’re doing. Guess what: None of us do. – Austin Kleon, Steal Like an Artist

3. One who fears the future, who fears failure, limits his activities. – Henry Ford, My Life And Work

4. The amateur believes he must first overcome his fear; then he can do his work. The professional knows that fear can never be overcome. – Steven Pressfield, The War of Art

5. Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself- nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. – Franklin D. Roosevelt, Inaugural Address, 1933

6. There must be times when you ask yourself who the heck you are to think you can do something this important. Yes, it must frighten you from time to time, or it won’t mean much. – John Jantsch, 2017 What I Want for You Most in 2017

7. Are you paralyzed with fear? That’s a good sign. Fear is good. Like self-doubt, fear is an indicator. Fear tells us what we have to do. Remember one rule of thumb: the more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it. – Steven Pressfield, The War of Art

8. Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, and not the absence of fear. – Mark Twain, Pudd’nhead Wilson, 1893

9. He who says, “I know no fear,” is no hero. No man knows courage unless he does know fear, and has that in him which is superior to fear, and conquers it. – Lyman Abbott, Problems of Life

10. Fear doesn’t go away. The warrior and the artist live by the same code of necessity, which dictates that the battle must be fought anew every day. – Steven Pressfield, The War of Art

19. Encouraging Quotes on Struggle and Sacrifice

1. Comfort never leads to excellence. – Jeff Goins, The Art of Work

2. All the adversity I’ve had in my life, all my troubles and obstacles have strengthened me. – Walt Disney, The Quotable Walt Disney

3. The sweetest pleasures are those which are hardest to be won. – Giacomo Casanova, The Story of My Life

4. Difficulties break some men but make others. No axe is sharp enough to cut the soul of a sinner who keeps on trying, one armed with the hope that he will rise even in the end. –  Nelson Mandela, Letter to Winnie Mandela, 1975

5. One-half of knowing what you want is knowing what you must give up before you get it. – Sidney Howard, Gone with the Wind: The Screenplay

You can have anything in life if you will sacrifice everything else for it. –  J.M. Barrie

6. Sacrifice is a part of life. It’s supposed to be. It’s not something to regret. It’s something to aspire to. Little sacrifices. Big sacrifices. A mother works so her son can go to school. A daughter moves home to take care of her sick father. – Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven

7. Great achievement is usually born of great sacrifice, and is never the result of selfishness. – Napoleon Hill, The Law of Success

8. Far from being a disadvantage, struggle is a decided advantage, because it develops those qualities which would forever lie dormant without it. – Napoleon Hill, The Law of Success in Sixteen Lessons

9. In some ways, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice. – Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

10. A man used to vicissitudes is not easily dejected. – Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas (1759)

20. Quotes to Inspire You towards Success

1. I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed. – Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery (1901)

2. Genius is often only the power of making continuous efforts. The line between failure and success is so fine that we scarcely know when we pass it. – Elbert Hubbard, American Bible

3. Satisfaction lies in the effort, not in the attainment. Full effort is full victory. – Mahatma Gandhi, All Men are Brothers

4. Everyone can rise above their circumstances and achieve success if they are dedicated to and passionate about what they do. – Nelson Mandela, Letter to cricketer Makhaya Ntini, 2009

5. I have always thought that one man of tolerable abilities may work great changes, and accomplish great affairs among mankind, if he forms a good plan, and then makes the execution of that plan his sole study and business. – Benjamin Franklin, The Way to Wealth

6. There’s really no secret about our approach. We keep moving forward -opening up new doors and doing new things -because we’re curious. And curiosity keeps leading us down new paths. We’re always exploring and experimenting. – Walt Disney, The Quotable Walt Disney

7. People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can’t find them, make them. – George Bernard Shaw, Mrs. Warren’s Profession

8. I have discovered the secret that after climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb. – Nelson Mandela, Long Road to Freedom

9. Personalizing successes sets people up for disastrous failure. They begin to treat the successes totally as a personal reflection of their abilities rather than the result of capitalizing on a good opportunity, being at the right place at the right time, or even being just plain lucky. They think their mere involvement in an undertaking guarantees success. – Brendan Moynihan, What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars

10. There are at least two kinds of games: finite and infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play – James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

21. Best Leadership Quotes for Entrepreneurs

1. Everybody acknowledges a real leader -a man who is fit to plan and command. And when you find a real leader who bears a title, you will have to inquire of someone else what his title is. He doesn’t boast about it. – Henry Ford, My Life and Work

2. A leader is best when people barely know he exists. Of a good leader, who talks little, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say, “We did this ourselves.” – Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

3. A leader. . .is like a shepherd. He stays behind the flock, letting the most nimble go out ahead, whereupon the others follow, not realizing that all along they are being directed from behind. – Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom

4. The greatest leader is not necessarily the one who does the greatest things. He is the one that gets the people to do the greatest things. – Ronald Reagan, CBS News Interview

5. The signs of outstanding leadership appear primarily among the followers. Are the followers reaching their potential? Are they learning? Serving? Do they achieve the required results? Do they change with grace? Manage conflict? – Max De Pree, Leadership is an Art

6. It is essential to understand that battles are primarily won in the hearts of men. Men respond to leadership in a most remarkable way and once you have won his heart, he will follow you anywhere. –Vince Lombardi, vincelombardi.com

A great leader’s courage to fulfill his vision comes from passion, not position. – John C. Maxwell

7. Like the gardener, a leader must take responsibility for what he cultivates; he must mind his work, try to repel enemies, preserve what can be preserved, and eliminate what cannot succeed. – Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom

8. Someone once said, ‘Life begins when you begin to serve’. Maybe if there’s a feeling that you can be of service, you feel you have to do it. – Ronald Reagan, CBS News Interview

9. Leaders are made, they are not born. They are made by hard effort, which is the price which all of us must pay to achieve any goal that is worthwhile. –Vince Lombardi, vincelombardi.com

10. Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things. –Peter Drucker, The Essential Drucker

22. Insightful Quotes on Dealing with Competition

1. We don’t think too much about what competitors are doing because I think it’s important to be focused on making the best possible products. – Elon Musk, StartmeupHK Forum

2. It is in vain for us to devise schemes by which competition can be put out of civilized life. Competition is the condition of life. – Lyman Abbott The Life that Really is (1899)

3. When a man can do better than everyone else in the same walk, he does not make any very painful exertions to outdo himself. The progress of improvement ceases nearly at the point where competition ends. – William Hazlitt, Characteristics

4. The ability to learn faster than competitors may be the only sustainable competitive advantage. – Arie P. de Geus, Planning as learning.

5. Competition is a by-product of productive work, not its goal. A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others. – Ayn Rand, The Ayn Rand Letter (1971–1976)

6. Competition brings out the best in products and the worst in people. – David Sarnoff, quoted in Dynamics of Leadership

7. The world is divided into people who do things and people who get the credit. Try, if you can, to belong to the first class. There’s far less competition. – Dwight Morrow quoted in Dwight Morrow by Harold Nicolson

8. I have been up against tough competition all my life. I wouldn’t know how to get along without it. – Walt Disney, The Quotable Walt Disney

23. Best Quotes on Keeping Good Company

1. If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together– African Proverb

2. The shortest way to get anywhere is to have good company. – H. Jackson Brown, Jr., Complete Life’s Little Instruction Book

3. I have begun to wonder if the secret of living well is not in having all the answers but in pursuing unanswerable questions in good company. -Rachel Naomi Remen, My Grandfather’s Blessings

4. People are always good company when they are doing what they really enjoy. – Samuel Butler, Delphi Complete Works of Samuel Butler

5. Keep good company, read good books, love good things and cultivate soul and body as faithfully as you can. – Louisa May Alcott, Ultimate Collection

6. If you ever find that you’re the most talented person in the room, you need to find another room. – Austin Kleon, Steal Like an Artist

7. The key is to keep company only with people who uplift you, whose presence calls forth your best. – Epictetus, Art of Living

8. In the face of a true friend, a man sees as it were, a second self. – Cicero, Treatises on Friendship and Old Age

9. There’s an old saying in business: You’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with. – Peter H. Diamandis, Bold

10. Where you stand depends on where you sit. – Rufus Mile, Miles Laws

Final Thoughts

Entrepreneurship can be a challenging thing, whether you are starting a blogging business or a traditional brick-and-mortar business.

Hopefully, these quotes have inspired you and given you some insights to think about as you go along your journey.

If you have always wanted to be an entrepreneur but have been scared to jump in, think about starting an online business. They are less risky because they are cheap to start and run. It is also much easier to start a business around your passions if you go with an online business.

As long as you help solve people’s problems or help meet their needs, you can earn a decent income online. Many people are already making a living by following their passion (see examples in these blogger income reports). Reverse engineer what is working for them and over time, you too could find yourself with a business you love.

If you wish to get started with a blogging business, check out my article on how to start a blog the right way.

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