Bernard Tapie Quotes

100 Bernard Tapie Quotes

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What counts is knowing that you can’t do everything… you should do some exercise, and not try to lift them before you’re in shape. And when you are in shape, it will be easy…
Bernard Tapie

If you can’t lift fifty pounds, you should do some exercise, and not try to lift them before you’re in shape.
Bernard Tapie

Each time I met with failure, I analysed it and always noticed, looking back, that I had ignored an essential aspect of the problem because it had seemed unimportant.
Bernard Tapie

Risk is the absolute driving force behind innovation.
Bernard Tapie

When you have a new idea, how do you expect people to react?
Bernard Tapie

Original ideas are systematically rejected by everyone, and it takes time for today’s utopias to become tomorrow’s realities.
Bernard Tapie

Real geniuses provide the ideas for twenty years later.
Bernard Tapie

Ideas and men, these are the two key words of business. Because of what value is a good idea without the men to make it real?
Bernard Tapie

Capturing people’s attention through words, gestures, sighs and charm, is something, I must admit, that aroused a profound sense of joy in me, which I have never lost.
Bernard Tapie

We had to fight, make money…
Bernard Tapie



The first rule comes from Socrates who said, ‘Know thyself.’
Bernard Tapie

You have to know yourself with enough humility to appreciate your areas of deficiency…
Bernard Tapie

Each second counts…
Bernard Tapie

You have to try to tell people what they want to hear, but without ever lying to them.
Bernard Tapie

Make them laugh, tell them stories – it’s up to you how you do it.
Bernard Tapie

You have to believe in your star before believing in galaxies.
Bernard Tapie

There is no great destiny until you have chosen the cause you are going to fight for, whether your choice was based on opportunism or calculation.
Bernard Tapie

We made a mistake in trying to prevent any increase in the number of the unemployed.
Bernard Tapie

Those who are absent or remain silent are always wrong. To assure successful promotion, you have to be present, daily, in order to create it.
Bernard Tapie

The boundary between the impossible and the extra-ordinary is extremely fine; life is a promise of adventure, often extraordinary, never impossible. Passion and fantasy can certainly result in excess, but if you have to choose between excess and immobility, don’t hesitate. Always and everywhere you have to dare.
Bernard Tapie



I learned that a boss doesn’t just give orders, but also, and most importantly, sets an example. He or she has to know how to make others better, and show them what to do. He nourishes them on what Shakespeare called ‘the milk of human kindness’, as well as with the energy necessary to win.
Bernard Tapie

My capital belongs to me, it’s my head and I would never be stupid enough to let someone cut it off.
Bernard Tapie

Making money represents the same challenge for a businessperson as breaking records does for an athlete.
Bernard Tapie

I have a taste for competition – to always do better, more, always more.
Bernard Tapie

Destiny, the famous ‘mektoub’ of the Orientals, was above all a superb and terrible mechanism of resignation. I was firmly decided not to fall into the trap of passivity when, observing others clipped and gagged, I suddenly discovered myself. I had caught a glimpse of my limited possibilities, but I was going to work to enlarge my universe to its utmost and started researching its limits, which I knew were greater than I imagined.
Bernard Tapie

Each time I met with failure, I analysed it and always noticed, looking back, that I had ignored an essential aspect of the problem because it had seemed unimportant. It was only later – too late – that I understood its importance. In business, like in love, like in sport, you cannot leave any detail out on the pretext that it’s not important.
Bernard Tapie

Being a little more than the others each time leads, in the long run, and in the final analysis, to being totally different from others. Each day is a lesson in courage.
Bernard Tapie

For me, doubt carries feelings of guilt along with it, which in turn engender resignation and discouragement. I was very moved by something I read in Gramsci about doubt: ‘The pessimism of intelligence, the optimism of action.’ That could be my motto.
Bernard Tapie

Dreams, risks and laughter – three words which I have always used to direct my life.
Bernard Tapie

Courage lies in accepting that you have to go farther when you feel your mind and body have reached their limit.
Bernard Tapie



Failure – especially if experienced early enough – serves to build the warrior. Rumours of the setbacks that anyone who takes risks is sure to encounter can too quickly weigh heavily on the shoulders of an entrepreneur… I reserve the right to fail as fundamental; it allows for clear-headed people, with resilient souls to rebound and go farther than they ordinarily would.
Bernard Tapie

The navigator who knows that a line connects his raft to the dock will be less afraid than the one who floats helplessly on the currents. Those who worry about the future and splash about anxiously have lost their point of reference: notably the family, friends, and solidarity with their peers.
Bernard Tapie

In business, like in the martial arts, the essential thing is not just to deflect blows, but to foresee where they’re coming from.
Bernard Tapie

There’s nothing more frustrating than seeing something that doesn’t work and having to explain it to a hard-headed boss who you know won’t listen anyway. Everyone knows that, since antiquity, petty rulers hate bearers of bad tidings, or those whose thinking goes against the grain. After some time, I decided that the best way to prove my predictions correct was to carry them out on my own, as I wished.
Bernard Tapie

This image might make you smile, but it is no less efficient for all that. You have to ceaselessly eradicate your weaknesses, which means your tendency to let yourself be taken in by the habits of ordinary men. You only catch the game by knowing its habits; it is easy to defeat a person if you know his habits.
Bernard Tapie

It’s not just by chance that statistics prove that people with elevated incomes live ten years longer than others.
Bernard Tapie

The feeling of injustice can give a person incredible force. No other feeling, neither hate, nor resentment, can give a person the energy he lacks. I never wanted revenge on my adversaries; I just ignored them. I absolutely had to prove that I was not what they thought I was, what they tried to force me to be. It’s through this rebellion against the limits that others want to impose on you that you overtake them, turning failure into indestructible powerful success.
Bernard Tapie

All businesses that fall flat on their faces have at least one point in common; over the years, they did not make a single investment.
Bernard Tapie

In today’s management, I absolutely do not believe in authority imposed by a hierarchy; decisions must be made, that’s obvious, but I want the team around me to be as responsible as I am, as motivated, as united in controlling our destiny as myself, and that seems to me absolutely fundamental.
Bernard Tapie

Any company philosophy that does not consider its human resources as its most important asset is doomed sooner or later to certain failure.
Bernard Tapie



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