The real test of business greatness is in giving opportunity to others.

In my own house I rigged up a laboratory and studied chemistry in the evenings, determined that there should be nothing in the manufacture of steel that I would not know. Although I had received no technical education I made myself master of chemistry and of the laboratory, which proved of lasting value.

American industry is spilling over with men who started life even with the leaders, with brains just as big, with hands quite as capable. And yet one man emerges from the mass, rises sheer about his fellows; and the rest remain.

Nothing is more fatal to success than taking one's job as a matter of course.

I have yet to hear an instance where misfortune hit a man because he worked overtime. I know lots of instances where it hit men who did not.

One of the most successful men I have known never carried a watch until he began to earn ten thousand dollars a year.

I am not a believer in large salaries. I hold that every man should be paid for personal production. Our big men at Bethlehem seldom get salaries of over one hundred dollars a week; but all of them receive bonuses computed entirely on the efficiencies and the economies registered in their departments.