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

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’re competitor-focused, you have to wait until there is a competitor doing something. Being customer-focused allows you to be more pioneering.

Invention is by its very nature disruptive. If you want to be understood at all times, then don’t do anything new.

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

Our success at Amazon is a function of how many experiments we do per year, per month, per week, per day.

Complaining is not a strategy.You have to work with the world as you find it, not as you would have it be.

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

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

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

Your brand is what other people say about you when you’re not in the room.

If you think about the long term then you can really make good life decisions that you won’t regret later.

Failure comes part and parcel with invention. It’s not optional.

We innovate by starting with the customer and working backwards. That becomes the touchstone for how we invent.

We got to talk about how lucky we are to have such amazing parents. They’ve always been and still are role models and mentors for us.

You don’t want to negotiate the price of simple things you buy every day.

We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.

Style … is a peculiar recasting and heightening, under a certain condition of spiritual excitement, of what a man has to say, in such a manner as to add dignity and distinction to it.

For poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion today is its unconscious poetry.

Culture looks beyond machinery, culture hates hatred; culture has one great passion, the passion for sweetness and light.

Culture is properly described as the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection.

If an historian be an unbeliever in all heroism, if he be a man who brings every thing down to the level of a common mediocrity, depend upon it, the truth is not found in such a writer.

Commercial rock ‘n’ roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music an obscene looting of a cultural expression.

I think that we need to change the culture, not blame the people that are playing the only game that exists.

In Eastern culture, people see ghosts, people talk about ghosts, it’s just accepted. And in Western culture it’s just not.