Estee Lauder Quotes

102 Estee Lauder Quotes (Josephine Esther Mentzer Quotes)

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I didn’t get where I am by thinking about it or dreaming it. I got there by doing it.
Estee Lauder

Business is there if you go after it.
Estee Lauder

Risk-taking is the cornerstone of empires.
Estee Lauder

Serenity is pleasant, but it lacks the ecstasy of achievement.
Estee Lauder

Accountants and lawyers make great accountants and lawyers. We need them, but we make the business decisions.
Estee Lauder

Whatever you give comes back to you.
Estee Lauder

I worked every day from nine, when I arrived to polish my jars, to six in the evening. I never lunched.
Estee Lauder

I learned early that being a perfectionist and providing quality was the only way to do business.
Estee Lauder

Persistence. It’s that certain little spirit that compels you to continue just when you’re at your most tired. It’s that quality that forces you to persevere, find the route around the stone wall. It’s the immovable stubbornness that will not allow you to cave in when everyone says give up.
Estee Lauder

Projecting your mind into a successful situation is the most powerful means to achieve goals.
Estee Lauder



I wanted to see my name in lights, but I was willing to settle for my name on a jar.
Estee Lauder

Beauty is an attitude.
Estee Lauder

People are not often naturally perfect and that's why God made stockings, shoes and cosmetics.
Estee Lauder

Your face should look as if you cared, and your best friend is your mirror.
Estee Lauder

I went into business by accident.
Estee Lauder

My ambition was to make every woman beautiful, not to make money.
Estee Lauder

There are no homely women, just lazy ones.
Estee Lauder

If you can’t smell it, you can’t sell it.
Estee Lauder

From where you sit, you can probably reach out with comparative ease and touch a life of serenity and peace. You can wait for things to happen and not get too sad when they don’t. That’s fine for some but not for me. Serenity is pleasant, but it lacks the ecstasy of achievement.
Estee Lauder

There is not such thing as bad times, I kept telling myself. There is not such thing as bad business. Business is there if you go after it.
Estee Lauder



I’ve always believed that if you stick to a thought and carefully avoid distraction along the way, you can fulfil a dream. My whole life has been about fulfilling dreams. I kept my eye on the target, whatever that target was. Whether your target is big or small, grand or simple, ambitious or personal, I’ve always believed that success comes from not letting your eyes stray from that target. Anyone who wants to achieve a dream must stay strong, focused and steady.
Estee Lauder

First comes the shy wish. Then you must have the heart to have the dream. Then, you work. And work.
Estee Lauder

When a person with experience meets a person with money, pretty soon, the person with the experience will have the money and the person with the money will have the experience.
Estee Lauder

Each businessperson must find a style, that voice that grows clearer and louder with each success and failure. Observing your own and your competitors’ successes and failures makes your inner business voice more sure and vivid.
Estee Lauder

I am a visceral person by nature. I act on instinct, quickly, without pondering possible disaster and without indulging in deep introspection.
Estee Lauder

I believed in my product. I loved my product. I loved to touch the creams, smell them, look at them, carry them with me. A person has to love her harvest if she’s to expect others to love it. And beauty was such a bountiful harvest.
Estee Lauder

People do make their luck by daring to follow their instincts, taking risks, and embracing every possibility.
Estee Lauder

One simply cannot start from zero. If you want to start your own business, save some money or know someone who can lend you some. You may not need a huge amount, but those first bills must be covered – and then some. When I began, business practice was based on CBD – Cash Before Delivery – not COD [Cash On Delivery]. The same holds true in many cases today.
Estee Lauder

In every life there is a moment – an event or a realization – that changes that life irrevocably. If the change is to be a happy one, one must be able to recognize the moment and seize it without delay.
Estee Lauder

I am what you would call a stern taskmaster. I expect perfection. And then a little more perfection when perfection is offered.
Estee Lauder



What makes a successful businesswoman? Is it talent? Well, perhaps, although I’ve known many enormously successful people who were not gifted in any outstanding way, not blessed with particular talent. Is it, then, intelligence? Certainly intelligence helps, but it’s not necessarily education or the kind of intellectual reasoning needed to graduate from the Wharton School of Business that are essential. What, then, is the mystical ingredient? It’s persistence. It’s that certain little spirit that compels you to continue just when you’re at your most tired. It’s that quality that forces you to persevere, find the route around the stone wall. It’s the immovable stubbornness that will not allow you to cave in when everyone says give up.
Estee Lauder

Make the most of what you have. I operated, full time, on that precept. If you can’t have everything you think you deserve at that moment, you would do well to surround yourself with symbols of your ideals. In that small office, I surrounded myself with touches of the good life, the lovely and intricately tapestried life of my imagination, an imagination that has always been, I’m proud to say, large enough to admit any possibility.
Estee Lauder

I’d risk the rent, but if it worked, I would start the business I always dreamed about. Risk-taking is the cornerstone of empires.
Estee Lauder

If in your mind’s eye you see a successful venture, a deal made, a profit accomplished, it has a superb chance of actually happening. Projecting your mind into a successful situation is the most powerful means to achieve goals. If you spent time with pictures of failure in your mind, you will orchestrate failure.
Estee Lauder

Look for a sweet person. Forget rich.
Estee Lauder

When you’re angry, never put it in writing. It’s like carving anger in stone. That makes implacable enemies.
Estee Lauder

[On remembering a rare encounter with archrival Charles Revson] He curtly informed me of his intention to buy my business so that he could be the Cadillac of the cosmetics industry. I replied lightly that I thought his intention quite flattering, but that I would like to buy his business and be the Rolls-Royce of the industry. Not known for his sense of humor, he stalked away without answering. War was declared. ‘I’ll destroy her,’ he told some mutual friends.
Estee Lauder

[On introducing her products into England] If I could start with the finest store in London, all the other great stores would follow.
Estee Lauder

[On her parents and her wanting to be 100 percent American] I loved them both so much – their beauty and their character, but I didn’t love feeling different because of their old country ways.
Estee Lauder

[On working a small department store run by two savvy women merchants] The ladies in their furs came to buy, and bought more when I waited on them. I knew it. I felt it.
Estee Lauder



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