"We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It's our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better."

"I constantly remind our employees to be afraid, to wake up every morning terrified. Not of our competition, but of our customers."

"Customers are always beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied, even when they report being happy and business is great."

"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."

"The most important single thing is to focus obsessively on the customer. It is our goal to be Earth's most customer-centric company."

"Most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you're probably being slow."

"I knew that when I was eighty, I was not going to regret having tried this. I knew that if I failed, I wouldn't regret that. But I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried."

"All of my best decisions in business and in life have been made with heart, intuition, guts — not analysis."

"Some decisions are consequential and irreversible — these are one-way doors. But most decisions aren't like that — they are changeable, reversible — they're two-way doors."

"Senior executives get paid to make a small number of high-quality decisions. Your job is not to make thousands of decisions every day."

"To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it's going to work, it's not an experiment."

"If you double the number of experiments you do per year, you're going to double your inventiveness."

"We need big failures in order to move the needle. If we don't, we're not swinging enough. You really should be swinging hard, and you will fail, but that's okay."

"I think frugality drives innovation, just like other constraints do. One of the only ways to get out of a tight box is to invent your way out."

"No customer was asking for Echo. This was definitely us wandering. Market research doesn't help."

"We've had three big ideas at Amazon that we've stuck with for 18 years, and they're the reason we're successful: Put the customer first. Invent. And be patient."

"I very frequently get the question: 'What's going to change in the next ten years?' I almost never get the question: 'What's not going to change in the next ten years?' And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two."

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

"Invention requires a long-term willingness to be misunderstood."

"Long-term thinking levers our existing abilities and lets us do new things we couldn't otherwise contemplate."

"Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1."

"I'd rather interview 50 people and not hire anyone than hire the wrong person."

"The missionaries love their product or their service and love their customers. The great paradox is that it's usually the missionaries who make more money."

"A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well."

"Your margin is my opportunity."

"In the end, we are our choices. Build yourself a great story."

"Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy — they're given, after all. Choices can be hard."

"Will you be clever at the expense of others, or will you be kind?"

"Jeff, one day you'll understand that it's harder to be kind than clever."

"Wandering in business is not efficient… but it's also not random. It's guided — by hunch, gut, intuition, curiosity, and powered by a deep conviction that the prize for customers is big enough that it's worth being a little messy and tangential to find our way there."