“Your brand is formed primarily, not by what your company says about itself, but what the company does.”

In the old world, you devoted 30% of your time to building a great service and 70% of your time to shouting about it. In the new world, that inverts.

We are our choices. Build yourself a great story.

If you have a business model that relies on customers being misinformed, you better start working on changing your business model.

We are stubborn on vision. We are flexible on details.

It is very difficult to get people to focus on the most important things when you’re in boom times.

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.

Your brand is your culture.

Brands mature over time, like a marriage. The bond you feel with your spouse is different than when you first met each other. Excitement and discovery are replaced by comfort and depth.

Your culture is your brand.

Europe has always represented a major strategic opportunity to achieve our goal of creating and building an enduring global brand.

The most sensible thing to do to people you hate is to drink their brandy.

If you do not care about your end user immensely, especially in the next few years, your brand will die.

The incredible brand awareness and bottom-line profits achievable through social media marketing require hustle, heart, sincerity, constant engagement, long-term commitment, and most of all, artful and strategic storytelling.

It’s still so rare for anyone to be personally acknowledged by a brand that the impact of such a simple, polite gesture on a customer’s buying habits could be huge.