Jeff Bezos quotes:

The killer app that got the world ready for appliances was the light bulb. So the light bulb is what wired the world. And they weren't thinking about appliances when they wired the world. They were really thinking about - they weren't putting electricity into the home. They were putting lighting into the home.

There are two ways to extend a business. Take inventory of what you're good at and extend out from your skills. Or determine what your customers need and work backward, even if it requires learning new skills. Kindle is an example of working backward.

Mediocre theoretical physicists make no progress. They spend all their time understanding other people's progress.

Millions of people were inspired by the Apollo Program. I was five years old when I watched Apollo 11 unfold on television, and without any doubt it was a big contributor to my passions for science, engineering, and exploration.

If your customer base is aging with you, then eventually you are going to become obsolete or irrelevant. You need to be constantly figuring out who are your new customers and what are you doing to stay forever young.

I don't want to use my creative energy on somebody else's user interface.

If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.

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

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.

You know, we love stories and we love narrative; we love to get lost in an author's world.

The common question that gets asked in business is, 'why?' That's a good question, but an equally valid question is, 'why not?'

I'm a big fan of all-you-can-eat plans, because they're simpler for customers.

On the Internet, companies are scale businesses, characterized by high fixed costs and relatively low variable costs. You can be two sizes: You can be big, or you can be small. It's very hard to be medium. A lot of medium-sized companies had the financing rug pulled out from under them before they could get big.

Market leadership can translate directly to higher revenue, higher profitability, greater capital velocity, and correspondingly stronger returns on invested capital.

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 best customer service is if the customer doesn't need to call you, doesn't need to talk to you. It just works.

Life's too short to hang out with people who aren't resourceful.

Part of company culture is path-dependent - it's the lessons you learn along the way.

The thing that motivates me is a very common form of motivation. And that is, with other folks counting on me, it's so easy to be motivated.

I like having the digital camera on my smart phone, but I also like having a dedicated camera for when I want to take real pictures.

What we need to do is always lean into the future; when the world changes around you and when it changes against you - what used to be a tail wind is now a head wind - you have to lean into that and figure out what to do because complaining isn't a strategy.

You don't want to negotiate the price of simple things you buy every day.

You're not going to make Hemingway better by adding animations.

What consumerism really is, at its worst is getting people to buy things that don't actually improve their lives.

You want your customers to value your service.

The key thing about a book is that you lose yourself in the author's world.

I went to Princeton specifically to study physics.

I wanted a woman who could get me out of a Third World prison. Life's too short to hang out with people who aren't resourceful.

But there's so much kludge, so much terrible stuff, we are at the 1908 Hurley washing machine stage with the Internet. That's where we are. We don't get our hair caught in it, but that's the level of primitiveness of where we are. We're in 1908.

People forget already how much utility they get out of the Internet - how much utility they get out of e-mail, how much utility they get out of even simple things like brochureware online.

The death knell for any enterprise is to glorify the past -- no matter how good it was."

... if it's not your style to stretch and go the extra mile to make sure our customer experience is great, you're going to have an allergic reaction to this company. You probably won't stay. If you do try and stay, but can't adapt to the culture then it will reject you like a virus from a healthy immune system.

What we want to be is something completely new. There is no physical analog for what Amazon.com is becoming.

Amazon.com strives to be the e-commerce destination where consumers can find and discover anything they want to buy online.

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

Our alliance with Toysrus.com has proven to be a great win for customers, and we've looked forward to taking the next step by introducing the new Babiesrus.com teamed with Amazon.com store since we forged the alliance last August.

Amazon Pages and Amazon Upgrade leverage Amazon's existing 'Search Inside the Book' technology to give customers unusual flexibility in how they buy and read books, .. In collaboration with our publishing partners, we're working hard to make the world's books instantly accessible anytime and anywhere.

Your brand is what people say about you when you're not in the room

Any business plan won't survive its first encounter with reality. The reality will always be different. It will never be the plan.

I don't know about you, but most of my exchanges with cashiers are not that meaningful.

I'm skeptical of any mission that has advertisers at its centerpiece.

There is no map, and charting a path ahead will not be easy. We will need to invent, which means we will need to experiment.

In Seattle you haven't had enough coffee until you can thread a sewing machine while it's running.

Because, you know, resilience - if you think of it in terms of the Gold Rush, then you'd be pretty depressed right now because the last nugget of gold would be gone. But the good thing is, with innovation, there isn't a last nugget. Every new thing creates two new questions and two new opportunities.

But there's still so much you can do with technology to improve the customer experience. And that's the sense in which I believe it's still Day One, and that it's early in the day. If anything, the rate of change is accelerating.

We've done price elasticity studies, and the answer is always that we should raise prices. We don't do that, because we believe -- and we have to take this as an article of faith -- that by keeping our prices very, very low, we earn trust with customers over time, and that that actually does maximize free cash flow over the long term.

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

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.

It's not an experiment if you know it's going to work

I think that, ah, I'm a very goofy sort of person in many ways.

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

I wouldn't be surprised if history records Tim Berners-Lee as the second Gutenberg.

The human brain is an incredible pattern-matching machine.

I'm not saying that advertising is going away. But the balance is shifting. If today the successful recipe is to put 70 percent of your energy into shouting about your service and 30 percent into making it great, over the next 20 years I think that's going to invert.

I think technology advanced faster than anticipated. In that whirlwind, a lot of companies didn't survive. The reason we have done well is because, even in that whirlwind, we kept heads-down focused on the customers. All the metrics that we can track about customers have improved every year.

I definitely believe people should pay for copyrighted works. And the laws are sufficient: They already require you to pay for copyright work. There's no confusion. The problem is...it's a heck of a lot easier to steal MP3s than to buy them.

No communication is terrible!

We're building a unique global platform...In the last 18 months we found that sellers and partners are interested in complementing their online and offline businesses with Amazon's platform

It's hard to find things that won't sell online.

We expect all our businesses to have a positive impact on our top and bottom lines ... Profitability is very important to us or we wouldn't be in this business.

The three most important things in retail are location, location, location. The three most important things for our consumer business are technology, technology, technology.

There are two kinds of companies, those that work to try to charge more and those that work to charge less. We will be the second

The death knell for any enterprise is to glorify the past -- no matter how good it was.

The missionary is building the product and building the service because they love the customer, because they love the product, because they love the service. The mercenary is building the product or service so that they can flip the company and make money.

Position yourself with something that captures your curiosity, something that you're missionary about.

A company shouldn't get addicted to being shiny, because shiny doesn't last.

Our garage was basically science fair central.

What I want to talk to you about today is the difference between gifts and choices. Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy-they're given after all. Choices can be hard. You can seduce yourself with your gifts if you're not careful, and if you do, it'll probably be to the detriment of your choices.

There'll always be serendipity involved in discovery.

If you're truly obsessed over customers, it'll cover a lot of errors.

I think one of the things people don't understand is we can build more shareholder value by lowering product prices than we can by trying to raise margins. It's a more patient approach, but we think it leads to a stronger, healthier company. It also serves customers much, much better.

If you look at academic studies, you can see that stock prices are most closely correlated with cash flow. It's such a straightforward number. Cash flow is what will drive shareholder returns.

If you're not stubborn, you'll give up on experiments too soon. And if you're not flexible, you'll pound your head against the wall and you won't see a different solution to a problem you're trying to solve.

We're working to lower the cost of spaceflight so that many people can afford to go and so that we humans can better continue exploring the solar system. Accomplishing this mission will take time, and we're working on it methodically.

If we can keep our competitors focused on us while we stay focused on the customer, ultimately we'll turn out all right.

We expect all our businesses to have a positive impact on our top and bottom lines. Profitability is very important to us or we wouldn't be in this business.

Web 1.0 was making the Internet for people, Web 2.0 is making the Internet better for companies.

Word of mouth is very powerful.

If you're not doing something that people will remark on, then it's going to be hard to generate word of mouth.

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.

The one thing that offends me the most is when I walk by a bank and see ads trying to convince people to take out second mortgages on their home so they can go on vacation. That's approaching evil.

My view is there's no bad time to innovate.

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.

There are two kinds of companies, those that work to try to charge more and those that work to charge less. We will be the second.

I believe you have to be willing to be misunderstood if you're going to innovate.

I've always been at the intersection of computers and whatever they can revolutionize.

Real estate is the key cost of physical retailers. That's why there's the old saw: location, location, location.

Strip malls are history.

I strongly believe that missionaries make better products. They care more. For a missionary, it's not just about the business. There has to be a business, and the business has to make sense, but that's not why you do it. You do it because you have something meaningful that motivates you.

The book is not really the container for the book. The book itself is the narrative. It's the thing that people create.

I very much believe the Internet is indeed all it is cracked up to be.

What's dangerous is not to evolve.

I'm skeptical that the novel will be 're-invented.'

Cultures, for better or worse, are very stable.

One of the things it was obvious you could do with an online store is have a much more complete selection.

Entrepreneurs must be willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time.

I try to spend my time on areas that I think are important for the future, and where I think I can add value.

Obsess about customers, not competitors.

I knew that if I failed I wouldn't regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not trying.

The world is littered with corpses that predicted technology in a particular arena was done. If there's another gigantic step change out there, we don't yet know what it is.

We can't be in survival mode. We have to be in growth mode.

It's harder to be kind than clever

Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice.

I love my life. I love being an inventor.

Above all else, align with customers. Win when they win. Win only when they win.

The great thing about fact-based decisions is that they overrule the hierarchy.

Everything you are comes from your choices.

If you think about the long term then you can really make good life decisions that you won't regret later.

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

All businesses need to be young forever. If your customer base ages with you, you're Woolworth's.

When [competitors are] in the shower in the morning, they're thinking about how they're going to get ahead of one of their top competitors. Here in the shower, we're thinking about how we are going to invent something on behalf of a customer.

The most important single thing is to focus obsessively on the customer. Our goal is to be earth's most customer-centric company.

E-mail has some magical ability to turn off the politeness gene in a human being.

If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell 6 friends. If you make customers unhappy on the Internet, they can each tell 6,000 friends.

People who were right a lot of the time were people who often changed their minds.

My grandfather taught me that it is harder to be kind than it is to be clever.

You don't choose your passions; your passions choose you.

Teachers, who are really good create that environment where you can be very satisfied by the process of learning. If you do something and you find it a very satisfying experience then you want to do more of it. The great teachers somehow convey in their very attitude and their words and their actions and everything they do that this is an important thing you're learning. You end up wanting to do more of it and more of it and more of it. That's a real talent some people have to convey the importance of that and to reflect it back to the students.

If you are going to do large-scale invention, you have to be willing to do three things: You must be willing to fail; you have to be willing to think long term; and you have to be willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time.