When it’s tough, will you give up or will you be relentless?

Failure and invention are inseparable twins.

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

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

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.

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

People who are right most of the time are people who change their minds often

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

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

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.

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

Are you lazy or just incompetent?

The Internet is disrupting every media industry...people can complain about that, but complaining is not a strategy. And Amazon is not happening to book selling, the future is happening to book selling.

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.

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.

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.

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

We continued to improve our customer experience during the quarter with the opening of our music store, our easier-to-navigate store layout, and our expansion into the local U.K. and German book markets. These initiatives will continue to require aggressive investment and entail significant execution challenges.

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.

I'm going to go do this crazy thing. I'm going to start this company selling books online.

The Internet is disrupting every media industry...people can complain about that, but complaining is not a strategy. And Amazon is not happening to book selling, the future is happening to book selling.

Our vision is every book ever printed in any language [fetched and viewable on our eBook Kindle device] in under 60 seconds.

And I still buy books at B&N, Borders and Elliot Bay ... I probably shouldn't admit this. But I don't care. I love great bookstores.

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.

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

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

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.

We believe that over time this could turn into a significant business for Amazon, significant revenue stream for publishers and authors and a helpful customer service for readers,

We believe there's a tremendous opportunity ahead across the $5 trillion retail market globally.

We'd like to thank Joe for his hard work and accomplishments over the last year. I believe he is making the right decision for him and his family under the circumstances. We all wish him the very best.

We're trying to build the most customer-centric company in the world, ... I genuinely believe the balance of power online shifts away from the merchant toward the consumer.

As the era of Internet sector investing comes to a close, it appears that investors are becoming more discerning about companies on an individual level, something we believe will result in a positive impact on the competitive landscape,

Competition will accelerate in 1999. We still believe it is impossible to keep the pronounced bookselling market share lead over the long term.

Competition will accelerate in 1999, ... We still believe it is impossible to keep the pronounced bookselling market share lead over the long term.

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

I now believe it's possible that the current rules governing business-method and software patents could end up harming us all, ... despite the call from many thoughtful folks for us to give up our patents unilaterally, I don't believe it would be right for us to do so.

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.

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.

A lot of people – and I’m just not one of them – believe that you should live for the now. I think what you do is think about the great expanse of time ahead of you and try to make sure that you’re planning for that in a way that’s going to leave you ultimately satisfied. This is the way it works for me.

It’s very important for entrepreneurs to be realistic. So if you believe on that first day while you’re writing the business plan that there’s a 70 percent chance that the whole thing will fail, then that kind of relieves the pressure of self-doubt.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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 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.

We believe that over time this could turn into a significant business for Amazon, significant revenue stream for publishers and authors and a helpful customer service for readers,

We get to move more units across that same fixed-cost structure. So it does help our business and help customers at the same time,

If you have a business model that relies on customers being misinformed, you better start working on changing your business model.