Top 90 B.C. Forbes Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Mediocre men wait for opportunity to come to them. Strong, able, alert men go after opportunity.”

— B.C. Forbes

52. “It is when things go hardest, when life becomes most trying, that there is greatest need for having a fixed goal.”

— B.C. Forbes

53. “A price has to be paid for success. Almost invariably those who have reached the summits worked harder and longer, studied and planned more assiduously, practiced more self- denial, overcame more difficulties than those of us who have not risen so far.”

— B.C. Forbes

54. “Search and you will find that at the base and birth of every great business organization was an enthusiast, man consumed with earnestness of purpose, with confidence in his powers, with faith in the worthwhileness of his endeavors.”

— B.C. Forbes

55. “Better to be occasionally cheated than perpetually suspicious.”

— B.C. Forbes

56. “The fellow who isn’t fired with enthusiasm is apt to be fired.”

— B.C. Forbes

57. “Upon our children-how they are taught-rests the fate-or fortune-of tomorrow’s world.”

— B.C. Forbes

58. “A shady business never yields a sunny life.”

— B.C. Forbes

59. “The person who renders loyal service in a humble capacity will be chosen for higher responsibilities, just as the biblical servant who multiplied the one pound given him by his master was made ruler over ten cities...”

— B.C. Forbes

60. “Selfishness corrodes. Unselfishness ennobles, satisfies. Don’t put off the joy derivable from doing helpful, kindly things for others.”

— B.C. Forbes

61. “Backboneless employees are too ready to attribute the success of others to luck. Luck is usually the fruit of intelligent application. The man who is intent on making the most of his opportunities is too busy to bother about luck.”

— B.C. Forbes

62. “I resolve for 1920 to sit down all by myself and take a personal stock-taking once a month. To be no more charitable in viewing my own faults than I am an viewing the faults of others. To face the facts candidly and courageously. To address myself carefully, prayerfully, to remedying defects.”

— B.C. Forbes

63. “The man who is intent on making the most of his opportunities is too busy to bother about luck.”

— B.C. Forbes

64. “The man without religion is as a ship without a rudder.”

— B.C. Forbes

65. “He best keeps from anger who remembers that God is always looking upon him.”

— B.C. Forbes

66. “The real friend is he or she who can share all our sorrow and double our joys.”

— B.C. Forbes

67. “The Christmas spirit brings home to us-or should bring home to us-the profound Biblical truth that it is more blessed to give than to receive. Anything which inspires unselfishness makes for our ennoblement. Christmas does that. I am all for Christmas.”

— B.C. Forbes

68. “It’s so much easier to do good than to be good.”

— B.C. Forbes

69. “Success is sweetest to one who has known failure.”

— B.C. Forbes

70. “If a pig could pray, it would pray for swill. What do you pray for?”

— B.C. Forbes

71. “Time mends all, ends all things earthly.”

— B.C. Forbes

72. “Many a man thinks he is patient when, in reality, he is indifferent.”

— B.C. Forbes

73. “It is the hard-boiled employer, not the soft-hearted species, that incites most of our strikes and does most ot endanger the harmonious progress of democracy.”

— B.C. Forbes

74. “Next to the dog, the wastebasket is your best friend.”

— B.C. Forbes

75. “Use life to provide something that outlasts it.”

— B.C. Forbes

76. “Success consists of being and doing, not simply accumulating.”

— B.C. Forbes

77. “Anything that inspires unselfishness makes for our ennoblement. Christmas does that. I am all for Christmas.”

— B.C. Forbes

78. “I have known not a few men who, after reaching the summits of business success, found themselves miserable on attaining retirement age. They were so exclusively engrossed in their day to day affairs that they had no time for friend making.”

— B.C. Forbes

79. “It is not a case of whether we want to wash our hands of Europe or want to help her to regain her feet. The troubles of Europe have been laid on our doorstep, so to speak, and will plague us, if we do nothing to cure them, whether we like it or not.”

— B.C. Forbes

80. “Golf is an ideal diversion, but a ruinous disease.”

— B.C. Forbes

81. “The victors of the battles of tomorrow will be those who can best harness thought to action. From office boy to statesman, the prizes will be for those who most effectively exert their brains, who take deep, earnest and studious counsel of their minds, who stamp themselves as thinkers.”

— B.C. Forbes

82. “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

83. “Money, or even power, can never yield happiness unless it be accompanied by the goodwill of others.”

— B.C. Forbes

84. “Some people are so methodical that that is all they are or ever will be.”

— B.C. Forbes

85. “The man of fixed ingrained principles who has mapped out a straight course, and has the courage and self-control to adhere to it, does not find life complex. Complexities are all of our own making.”

— B.C. Forbes

86. “We must learn that to enjoy happiness we must conscientiously and continuously seek to spread happiness. Selfishness is suicidal to happiness.”

— B.C. Forbes

87. “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

88. “Whimpering never kept a leaking vessel from foundering. Vigorously manning the pumps has. Get busy with your head and hands, not your chin.”

— B.C. Forbes

89. “To get the most out of the world one must conscientiously strive to put the most into it. Life without worthy ideals becomes wholly unsatisfying, sour. If our supreme objective is to serve, no blow fate may administer can daunt us.”

— B.C. Forbes

90. “An idea, like a machine, must have power applied to it before it can accomplish anything.”

— B.C. Forbes

91. “A nation’s economic salvation does not lie in the amount of money its rich inhabitants can squander recklessly. A nation’s economic salvation lies in the amount of money its inhabitants can save and invest after providing themselves with all the necessaries and all the reasonable comforts of life.”

— B.C. Forbes

92. “You have no idea how big the other fellow’s troubles are.”

— B.C. Forbes

93. “Cheerfulness is among the most laudable virtues. It gains you the good will and friendship of others. It blesses those who practice it and those upon whom it is bestowed.”

— B.C. Forbes

94. “Are you doing the kind of work you were built for, so that you can expect to be able to do very large amounts of that kind and thrive under it? Or are you doing a kind of which you can do comparatively little.”

— B.C. Forbes

95. “If the United States is to produce a nation of investors-as we must if we are to gain financial world-leadership-it is imperative that boards of directors be so constituted as to adequately represent the interests and inspire the complete confidence of investors of moderate substance.”

— B.C. Forbes

96. “The bell of public opinion is today making the Morgan-Rockefeller-Vanderbilt class jump. Nor are the strongest of our corporations immune. The railroads have had to jump pretty lively, and certain gigantic industrial combinations are also being put through their paces.”

— B.C. Forbes

97. “If the deal isn’t good for the other party, it isn’t good for you.”

— B.C. Forbes

98. “The truth doesn’t hurt unless it ought to.”

— B.C. Forbes