B. C. Forbes quotes

Opportunity rarely knocks on your door. Knock rather on opportunity's door if you ardently wish to enter.
- B. C. Forbes

Real riches are the riches possessed inside.
- B. C. Forbes

If you don’t drive your business, you will be driven out of business.
- B. C. Forbes

It is only the farmer who faithfully plants seeds in the Spring, who reaps a harvest in the Autumn.
- B. C. Forbes

Christmas is a tonic for our souls. It moves us to think of others rather than of ourselves. It directs our thoughts to giving.
- B. C. Forbes

A business like an automobile, has to be driven, in order to get results.
- B. C. Forbes

Our future and our fate lie in our wills more than in our hands, for our hands are but the instruments of our wills.
- B. C. Forbes

Success is sweetest to one who has known failure.
- B. C. Forbes

The man who is intent on making the most of his opportunities is too busy to bother about luck.
- B. C. Forbes

How you start is important, but it is how you finish that counts. In the race for success, speed is less important than stamina. The sticker outlasts the sprinter.
- B. C. Forbes

One worthwhile task carried to a successful conclusion is better than 50 half-finished tasks.
- B. C. Forbes

Success comes if you love what you do. There is no other way to success.
- B. C. Forbes

Remember, diamonds are only jumps of coal that stuck to their jobs.
- B. C. Forbes

The bargain that yields mutual satisfaction is the only one that is apt to be repeated.
- B. C. Forbes

The men who have done big things are those who were not afraid to attempt big things, who were not afraid to risk failure in order to gain success.
- B. C. Forbes

The man who has won millions at the cost of his conscience is a failure.
- B. C. Forbes

The man who has done his level best… is a success, even though the world may write him down a failure.
- B. C. Forbes

It’s so much easier to do good than to be good.
- B. C. Forbes

Spend your life on something that will outlast you.
- B. C. Forbes

A word of appreciation often can accomplish what nothing else could accomplish.
- B. C. Forbes

Selfishness corrodes. Unselfishness ennobles, satisfies. Don’t put off the joy derivable from doing helpful, kindly things for others.
- B. C. Forbes

Difficulties should act as a tonic. They should spur us to greater exertion.
- B. C. Forbes

What you have outside you counts less than what you have inside you.
- B. C. Forbes

Money, or even power, can never yield happiness unless it be accompanied by the goodwill of others.
- B. C. Forbes

The human being who lives only for himself finally reaps nothing but unhappiness. Selfishness corrodes. Unselfishness ennobles, satisfies.
- B. C. Forbes

Madame Curie didn’t stumble upon radium by accident. She searched and experimented and sweated and suffered years before she found it. Success rarely is an accident.
- B. C. Forbes

Turn resolutely to work, to recreation, or in any case to physical exercise till you are so tired you can't help going to sleep, and when you wake up you won't want to worry.
- B. C. Forbes

The man who works 52 weeks in the year does not do his best in any one week of the year, Daniel Guggenheim, onetime head of the greatest smelting and mining family in America, impressed upon me. Real recreation quickens aspiration. The true purpose of recreation is not merely to amuse, not merely to afford pleasure, not merely to kill time, but to increase our fitness, enhance our usefulness, spur achievement.
- B. C. Forbes

Enthusiasm is the electric current that keeps the engine of life going at top speed. Enthusiasm is the very propeller of progress.
- B. C. Forbes

Triumph often is nearest when defeat seems inescapable.
- B. C. Forbes

Whenever calamity howlers shake their heads and impress upon you that this, that, and the next dire catastrophe is to befall this nation or the nations of the world-such as, for example, that exhaustion of the world’s oil supply will bring all transportation and machinery to a standstill through lack of lubrication, or that exhaustion of the earth’s stores of coal will make life unlivable in these cold climates-just smile and reply that the worst troubles of all are those that never happen [and] that you prefer not to cross shaky bridges until you come to them....
- B. C. Forbes

Many of the most successful men I have known have never grown up. Youthfulness of spirit is the twin brother of optimism… Resist growing up!
- B. C. Forbes

We must learn that to enjoy happiness we must conscientiously and continuously seek to spread happiness. Selfishness is suicidal to happiness.
- B. C. Forbes

Without self-respect there can be no genuine success. Success won at the cost of self-respect is not success ? for what shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his own self-respect.
- B. C. Forbes

Accuse American businessmen of being responsible for radicalism and they would indignantly deny the accusation. Yet, in one fundamental sense, they are responsible. They are responsible in the sense that they have utterly neglected to take part in the work and the organization which precede the choosing of candidates for political office. Local political organizations all over the land are conducted and controlled, as a rule, by politicians.... Businessmen have shirked such responsibilities, leaving an untrammeled field to others less capable of carrying on the administration of government.
- B. C. Forbes

Vitally important for a young man or woman is, first, to realize the value of education and then to cultivate earnestly, aggressively, ceaselessly, the habit of self-education.
- B. C. Forbes

The most profitless things to manufacture are excuses.
- B. C. Forbes

You should remember that we need to consciously and constantly look for opportunities to increase the human happiness. Selfishness kills happiness.
- B. C. Forbes

Success consists of being and doing, not simply accumulating.
- B. C. Forbes

There is more credit and satisfaction in being a first-rate truck driver than a tenth-rate executive.
- B. C. Forbes

No man can fight his way to the top and stay at the top without exercising the fullest measure of grit, courage, determination, resolution.
- B. C. Forbes

Honesty is the cornerstone of character.
- B. C. Forbes

Jealousy is a mental cancer.
- B. C. Forbes

Any business arrangement that is not profitable to the other person will in the end prove unprofitable for you. The bargain that yields mutual satisfaction is the only one that is apt to be repeated.
- B. C. Forbes

Golf is an ideal diversion, but a ruinous disease.
- B. C. Forbes

Lady Luck generally woos those who earnestly, enthusiastically, unremittingly woo her.
- B. C. Forbes

True wealth is the wealth of the soul.
- B. C. Forbes

Think not of yourself as the architect of your career but as the sculptor. Expect to have to do a lot of hard hammering and chiseling and scraping and polishing.
- B. C. Forbes

The young man who addresses himself in stern earnest to organizing his life-his habits, his associations, his reading, his study, his work-stands far more chance of rising to a position affording him opportunity to exercise his organizing abilities than the fellow who dawdles along without chart or compass, without plan or purpose, without self-improvement and self-discipline.
- B. C. Forbes

Mediocre men wait for opportunity to come to them. Strong, able, alert men go after opportunity.
- B. C. Forbes

Wealth is spiritual, not material.
- B. C. Forbes

History has demonstrated that the most notable winners usually encountered heartbreaking obstacles before they triumphed. They won because they refused to become discouraged by their defeats.
- B. C. Forbes

The things that are most worthwhile in life are really those within the reach of almost every normal human being who cares to seek them out.
- B. C. Forbes

Kill time and you will kill your career.
- B. C. Forbes

Let us enter the New Year cheerfully. Let us resolve to look onto the bright side, to make the best of whatever may befall, to maintain faith that doing the right thing will ultimately bring victory.
- B. C. Forbes

Opportunity can benefit no man who has not fitted himself to seize it and use it. Opportunity woos the worthy, shuns the unworthy. Prepare yourself to grasp opportunity and opportunity is likely to come your way. It is not so fickle, capricious and unreasoning as some complain.
- B. C. Forbes

Tell me how a young man spends his evenings and I will tell you how far he is likely to go in the world. The popular notion is that a youth’s progress depends upon how he acts during his working hours. It doesn’t. It depends far more upon how he utilizes his leisure…. If he spends it in harmless idleness, he is likely to be kept on the payroll, but that will be about all. If he diligently utilizes his own time … to fit himself for more responsible duties, then the greater responsibilities-and greater rewards-are almost certain to come to him.
- B. C. Forbes

There are two brands of discontent: the brand that merely fosters greed and snarling and back-biting, and the brand that inspires greater and greater effort to reach the desired goal. Which is your brand?
- B. C. Forbes

When it comes to betting on yourself...you're a chicken-livered coward if you hesitate.
- B. C. Forbes

Ideas are the raw material of progress. Everything first takes shape in the form of an idea. But an idea by itself is worth nothing. An idea, like a machine, must have power applied to it before it can accomplish anything.
- B. C. Forbes