Bertie Charles Forbes (/fɔːrbz/; May 14, 1880 – May 6, 1954) was a Scottish-born American financial journalist and author who founded Forbes magazine.
Jealousy. . . is a mental cancer.
It's so much easier to do good than to be good.
Henry Ward Beecher, so the story goes, was once asked by a young preacher how he could keep his congregation wide awake and attentive during his sermons. Beecher replied that he always had a man watch for sleepers, with instructions, as soon as he saw anyone start nodding or dozing, to hasten to the pulpit and wake up the preacher. Aren't you and I usually less sensible? Would we not be inclined to have the watcher wake up not ourselves but the fellows caught sleeping? In other words, aren't we disposed always to blame others?
Plan your work - work your plan
It is when things go hardest, when life becomes most trying, that there is the greatest need for having a fixed goal, for having an air castle that the outside world cannot wreck. When few comforts come from without, it is all the more necessary to have a fount to draw from within. And the man or woman who has a star toward which to press cannot be thrown off the course, no matter how the world may try, no matter how far things seem to be wrong.
It can be set down as a broad, general principle that we cannot indulge in idleness and abundance during both the first and second half of our life. Study, application, industry, enthusiasm while we are young usually enable us to enjoy life when we grow older. But unless we toil and strive and earn all we can in the first half, the second half of our life is liable to bring disappointment, discomfort, distress. The time to put forth effort is when we are most able to do it, namely, in the years of our greatest strength. The law of compensation hasn't ceased to function.
The man who has won millions at the cost of his conscience is a failure.
Are soft-hearted people handicapped in business? You have heard a businessman say of someone else, He's all right, but he's too soft-hearted. . . . To be soft-hearted may be handicapping, in a sense. But on the whole, a soft heart is to be preferred to a hard heart. Hard-hearted, severe, dominating giants sometimes manage to get further and to amass more money. But they get less genuine joy out of life. . . . It is the hard-boiled employer, not the soft-hearted species, that incites most of our strikes and does most to endanger the harmonious progress of democracy.
Difficulties should act as a tonic. They should spur us to greater exertion.
Next to the dog, the wastebasket is your best friend.
Think not of yourself as the architect of your career but as the sculptor. Expect to have to do a lot of hard hammering and chiselingand scraping and polishing.
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.
The man who is cocksure that he has arrived is ready for the return journey.
What one thing does the world need most today-apart, that is, from the all-inclusive thing we call righteousness? Aren't you inclined to agree that what this old world needs is just the art of being kind? Every time I visit a factory or any other large business concern, I find myself trying to diagnose whether the atmosphere is one of kindliness or the reverse. And somehow, if there is palpably lacking that spirit of kindness, the owners. . . have fallen short of achieving 24-carat success no matter how imposing the financial balance sheet may be.
An idea, like a machine, must have power applied to it before it can accomplish anything.
How you start is important, very important, but in the end it is how you finish that counts. It is easier to be a self-starter than a self-finisher. The victor in the race is not the one who dashes off swiftest but the one who leads at the finish. In the race for success, speed is less important than stamina. The sticker outlasts the sprinter in life's race. In America we breed many hares but not so many tortoises.
Justice must be blind to the hardness or softness of a man's hands, as well as to the leanness or fatness of his pocketbook
The human being who lives only for himself finally reaps nothing but unhappiness. Selfishness corrodes. Unselfishness ennobles, satisfies.
Triumph often is nearest when defeat seems inescapable.
Which class is happiest, the rich, the middle class or the poor? A very successful executive of a large organization touches upon this vital subject in a long letter to all his salesmen. He uses as his text a passage from Robinson Crusoe which included this: ""My Father bid me observe it, and I should always find that the calamities of life were shared among the upper and lower part of mankind; but that the middle station had the fewest disasters, and were not exposed to so many vicissitudes as the higher or lower part of mankind.