Top 100 Felix Dennis Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “False praise is worse than no praise.”

— Felix Dennis

52. “Time is the only thing we cannot replace, apart from our health and our lives. I resent wasting a moment of it. But.”

— Felix Dennis

53. “The key to successful business is self belief and application.”

— Felix Dennis

54. “Rich people always have a certain degree of debt. Apparently it helps to reduce taxes. I’m not so hot on the bean-counting side.”

— Felix Dennis

55. “Sometimes, to ensure that a talented individual will work for you, or will stay working with you, you need to be flexible. Money is not always the great motivator here. Talented people want a good salary, of course, but surprisingly often they are more attracted to new opportunities and challenges.”

— Felix Dennis

56. “I should have liked to get married, but over many decades I have lived essentially alone. I go to sleep when I’m tired, get up when I wake up, have my food prepared when I’m hungry. I can’t bear the thought that I’d have to coincide, make an effort.”

— Felix Dennis

57. “Few things in life are certain except death and being taxed.”

— Felix Dennis

58. “It’s a long, slow sunset for ink-on-paper magazines, but sunsets can produce vast sums of money.”

— Felix Dennis

59. “I want to prove that if you write in strict meter and rhyme about subjects people care about, they will buy poetry.”

— Felix Dennis

60. “It’s so easy to delegate important work to people who are similar in temperament and skill-sets to you, or to promote them. So easy and so wrong.”

— Felix Dennis

61. “With the greatest of respect, I have watched Apple from the day it started. I was publishing magazines about the Apple II before most people had ever heard what a personal computer was.”

— Felix Dennis

62. “Poetry is one of the oldest of all art forms, and one of its powers for shamans and tribal leaders was the mnemonic.”

— Felix Dennis

63. “I am absolutely convinced that my life was redeemed by poetry.”

— Felix Dennis

64. “I thoroughly object to getting old. If you could let me be 16 again, I’d give you everything I’ve got and everything I’ll ever have.”

— Felix Dennis

65. “I loathe and detest movies and television and don’t watch any. I do not have the time.”

— Felix Dennis

66. “No woman or girl is going to want to spend time looking at pretty dresses on the Internet. Vogue is going to be around for a long time to come.”

— Felix Dennis

67. “I’ve always noted with some awe the reading habits of the Australian public. Australians read more newspapers and magazines per head of population than almost any other country in the world.”

— Felix Dennis

68. “Persuading them to join is not the problem, but separating the wheat from the chaff is harder.”

— Felix Dennis

69. “Discourse has ended in America. It’s all just shouting and ranting and demonization. Do you know how the rest of the world laughs at you guys? Have you got any idea? They’re just rocking with laughter night and day.”

— Felix Dennis

70. “It’s very difficult to be continuously charitable in a capitalistic society. You’ve also got to make sure that you can pay everyone who works for you.”

— Felix Dennis

71. “The follow-through, the execution, is a thousand times more important than a ‘great idea’. In fact, if the execution is perfect, it sometimes barely matters what the idea is. If you want to get rich, don’t sit around waiting for inspiration to strike. Just get busy getting rich.”

— Felix Dennis

72. “People who get trapped in the tunnel vision of making money think that is all there is to life.”

— Felix Dennis

73. “With a poetry book I can send 100 copies out to reviewers and other people, and even do it in advance and get their response. It’s difficult with iPad: how do you send it out for free, and how do you even disseminate it before it goes into their store?”

— Felix Dennis

74. “Publishing magazines for yourself is not good business, man.”

— Felix Dennis

75. “A partnership is not a marriage. In a marriage, you should be willing to die for your partner. To share everything. To kill for them, if you have to. But in a partnership, the making of money comes first. Friendship and affection comes later – if you’re lucky, as I have been. I.”

— Felix Dennis

76. “No poetry that I’m aware of, however bad or glorious, has ever left somebody a worse person than they were before they read it.”

— Felix Dennis

77. “When I was young, I wanted to be the greatest blues singer of all time. I wrecked my education and left home for it.”

— Felix Dennis

78. “I hear poets complaining: ‘We face what our forebears did not face. We face TV. We face radio. We face this and that.’”

— Felix Dennis

79. “Very, very few entrepreneurs who accept a 51 percent partner in a new venture will get rich if they are also expected to run it. Control is mandatory.”

— Felix Dennis

80. “As with the onset of sudden celebrity, for the newly rich, the world often becomes a darker, narrower, less generous place; a paradox that elicits scant sympathy, but is nonetheless true.”

— Felix Dennis

81. “There are as many forms of happiness as sorrow, though most prove fleeting.”

— Felix Dennis

82. “I have been portrayed by actors in three television documentaries, two plays, one musical and a film. It’s no fun watching yourself being traduced and imitated by an actor.”

— Felix Dennis

83. “Anyone not busy learning is busy dying. For as long as you foster a willingness to learn, you will ward off sclerosis of the brain and hardening of the mental arteries. Curiosity has led many a man and women into the valley of serious wealth.”

— Felix Dennis

84. “Poetry forces a writer to condense and crystallise his thoughts and often represents a short cut to truths unsuspected by the author himself.”

— Felix Dennis

85. “I only buy a computer when it’s two years old, after the glitches have been worked out.”

— Felix Dennis

86. “Computers are wasteful of paper and time. Once, we’d get documents with a few errors. Now, people make hundreds of copies until each sheet is flawless and memos are duplicated endlessly. Managers get swamped with emails.”

— Felix Dennis

87. “Everything I publish is for my readers.”

— Felix Dennis

88. “You can actually be bored stiff while you’re dying.”

— Felix Dennis

89. “People really do not have time to read all the newspapers in the world and all the sites that we now commonly use on the web. There is no possibility of keeping up.”

— Felix Dennis

90. “You don’t have to live in a garage to write great poetry.”

— Felix Dennis

91. “America, ladies and gentlemen, has done more for me financially than Britain ever has, or ever could have done.”

— Felix Dennis

92. “Employees respect a boss who knows the difference between the mundane and the exceptional. Remember that not all employees respond well to incentive bonuses or a dangled carrot of any kind. They seek recognition, not bribery. 7.”

— Felix Dennis

93. “Competition is the heart, soul, liver, lungs and kidney of the beast we call Western capitalism.”

— Felix Dennis

94. “Bossy people and glory hounds are mostly interested in building a power base so they can have yet more people to boss about. It’s pitiful and a little sad, but we have all seen it. We saw it in school. We saw it in the playground. We saw it in college. And we saw it in our first job. If you are observant, you have been seeing it nearly all your life. Such.”

— Felix Dennis

95. “You don’t want people to apply to work for you because of the salaries on offer – they should be driven by other desires. But if a salary isn’t commensurate with the market, potential winners will not be able to afford to work for you.”

— Felix Dennis

96. “Happiness? Do not make me laugh. The rich are not happy. I have yet to meet a single really rich happy man or woman – and I have met many rich people. The demands from others to share their wealth become so tiresome, and so insistent, they nearly always decide they must insulate themselves. Insulation breeds paranoia and arrogance. And loneliness. And rage that you have only so many years left to enjoy rolling in the sand you have piled up.”

— Felix Dennis

97. “Not everyone works to get rich. In fact, most people do not. But almost everyone wishes to be respected. With promotion comes respect. And with delegation comes promotion. If your company is young and a bit rickety, meritocracy, delegation and promotion are the bricks and mortar that will make it stronger. Do.”

— Felix Dennis

98. “As an owner, or an owner in training, you must always be alert for the telltale signs that here is a candidate for promotion and delegation.”

— Felix Dennis

99. “There is absolutely nothing more likely to dampen the prospects of becoming rich than a nice, fat, regular salary check.”

— Felix Dennis

100. “By focusing hard on obtaining that human capital you will vastly increase your chances of becoming rich. Stupid.”

— Felix Dennis