“We asked ourselves what we wanted this company to stand for. We didn’t want to just sell shoes. I wasn’t even into shoes – but I was passionate about customer service.”

If you’re worried about putting food on the table or putting a roof over your head, that stress is definitely will contribute to unhappiness, but once you have your basic needs met then incremental money.

The biggest (and hardest) lesson I’ve learned in life is that the external world is just a reflection of the world within.

There’s a big difference between motivation and inspiration: Inspire through values and motivation takes care of itself.

Money alone isn’t enough to bring happiness… happiness is when you’re actually truly ok with losing everything you have.

The problem when someone feels burned out, bored, unchallenged, or stifled by their work is not the job itself but rather the environment and playground rules given to them to do the job at hand.

Customer service shouldn’t just be A department, it should be the entire company.

We decided that if we get the culture right, most of the stuff, like building a brand around delivering the very best customer service, will just take care of itself.

Whatever you are thinking, think bigger.

Don’t play games that you don’t understand, even if you see lots of other people making money from them.

The ultimate definition of success is: you could lose everything that you have and truly be okay with it. Your happiness isn’t based on external factors.

If you’re focused on the friendship as its own reward, serendipitous stuff just happens. I know that sounds weird, but I can tell you for our 12 years of existence, it’s actually how a lot of stuff happens.

Our belief is that if you get the culture right, most of the other stuff, like great customer service, or building a great long-term brand or empowering passionate employees and customers, will happen on its own.

Good businesses generate missions to drive their profits. Great businesses generate profits to drive their missions.

Our customers call and e-mail us to say that’s how it feels when a Zappos box arrives. And that’s how we view this company.

Open, honest communication is the best foundation for any relationship, but remember that at the end of the day it’s not what you say or what you do, but how you make people feel that matters the most.

I believe that there’s something interesting about anyone and everyone – you just have to figure out what that something is.

Take our 20 best people away, and I will tell you that Microsoft will become an unimportant company.

We chose it because we deal with huge amounts of data. Besides, it sounds really cool.

The best innovation is sometimes the company, the way you organize the company.

I do think there is an important artistic component in what we do. As a technology company I’ve tried to really stress that.

You don’t need to have a 100 person company to develop that idea.

If you’re trying to create a company, it’s like baking a cake. You have to have all the ingredients in the right proportion.

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

Don’t live to please everyone. Embrace those who enjoy your company and to hell with the haters.