Gurley Quotes & Sayings

The faster you get back to people, the less brilliant you have to be, — Helen Gurley Brown

I've just been so lucky. I don't know if you're really able to take advantage of your full potential until you're older. There are a few people who are incredibly gifted and make it when they are very young, but I didn't. With women it takes longer. You just keep working and when you finally get it, it feels very, very nice. — Helen Gurley Brown

Good girls go to heaven and bad girls go everywhere — Helen Gurley Brown

Marketing executives like big budgets, as big budgets make it easier to grow the top line. — Bill Gurley

My own philosophy is if you're not having sex, you're finished. It separates the girls from the old people. — Helen Gurley Brown

You want to write a book for so many reasons ... The main reason ... is because it will make you well-known and beloved and popular and successful and famous and respected. You also write ... to make money, but that motivation is not first on the list. — Helen Gurley Brown

Good posture is the one most important thing anybody can do now to look better. — Helen Gurley Brown

Talkers expand like bread dough. — Helen Gurley Brown

People's lives change. To keep all your old friends is like keeping all your old clothes
pretty soon your closet is so jammed and everything so crushed you can't find anything to wear. Help these friends when they need you; bless the years and happy times when you meant a lot to each other, but try not to have the guilts if new people mean more to you now. — Helen Gurley Brown

If the goal is to build companies that maximize long-term equity value, then optimizing corporate performance in a way that Wall Street appreciates is obviously critical to that goal. — Bill Gurley

Trying to describe a good marriage is like trying to describe your adrenal glands. You know they're in there functioning but you don't really understand how they work. — Helen Gurley Brown

Charm is the next best asset after looks and brains - and can almost make up for looks. — Helen Gurley Brown

The only reason a man doesn't call is that he doesn't want to. — Helen Gurley Brown

Never throw anything good away
real wool, pure silk. Put it away and wait for it to come back. — Helen Gurley Brown

When you meet a man, don't you always idly wonder what he'd be like in bed? I do. — Helen Gurley Brown

Get up and do it if it needs to be done, even if you hate it! — Helen Gurley Brown

There is no better way to get to know someone than to have an affair ... it can save years of lunches. — Helen Gurley Brown

There are not that many people who know how to edit. It's a funny tiny little obscure talent but it's very special. You have to have the feeling of popular taste. — Helen Gurley Brown

You name it, we're out there with the latest and the best cutting edge. — Helen Gurley Brown

Do what's in front of you as well as possible. Keep going until you realize what you're best at. — Helen Gurley Brown

I fell in love with my country - its rivers, prairies, forests, mountains, cities and people. No one can take my love of country away from me! I felt then, as I do now, it's a rich, fertile, beautiful land, capable of satisfying all the needs of its people. It could be a paradise on earth if it belonged to the people, not to a small owning class. — Elizabeth Gurley Flynn

If you do the best you can, no matter how bad the situation, you probably are going to come out okay. — Helen Gurley Brown

Many consumer Internet business executives are loyalists of the Lifetime Value model, often referred to as the LTV model or formula. Lifetime value is the net present value of the profit stream of a customer. — Bill Gurley

Almost everybody who thinks about local thinks about daily deals, but companies like OpenTable and Zillow and Yelp are all getting their money from the local market. — Bill Gurley

Beauty can't amuse you, but brainwork - reading, writing, thinking - can.
— Helen Gurley Brown

Don't do small stuff early in your energy cycle or you'll blow your 'golden hours,' but occasionally you have to do the 'possible' to develop the momentum for the killer task. — Helen Gurley Brown

Eve's voice emanates from the walls of the station in an otherworldly, haunting way, as if she speaks from everywhere and nowhere at once. — Jason Gurley

Most firms are hierarchical in nature, with everyone getting different slices of the economic pie. The problem is those slices are negotiated every time a firm raises a new fund, so in between funds, which is most of the time, the partners are trying to outgun one another to make a stronger case for themselves. — Bill Gurley

At the age of 70-something, Helen Gurley Brown was still a woman who knew how to get men to look at her. — John Searles

After you're older, two things are possibly more important than any others: health and money. — Helen Gurley Brown

I missed the moonlight, the stars. There were times I forgot that there was an entire universe above the clouds. It was as if a shroud had been pulled around the Earth. Over time, we would forget everything that we had once struggled so hard to observe and learn and prove. We would forget about Jupiter and its churning storms. We would forget about the Big Dipper, about Halley's comet. We would stumble across telescopes in old department stores and never give them a second look, never wonder about the things they once made large. — Jason Gurley

Facebook has stitched together your social graph. The idea of an interest graph is to bring together everyone that has shared interests. If I can isolate the people who are into mountain biking in Marin, in one place, the ability to put ads against that is really high. — Bill Gurley

I just had the idea that all the covergirls should be gorgeous, and not just interesting, not beautiful in an offbeat or exotic way, just plain yummy gorgeous. — Helen Gurley Brown

It is critical to bundle all future variable costs of supporting the customer in order to fairly estimate the future contribution. — Bill Gurley

A popular saying in Alderson went as follows: 'They work us like a horse, feed us like a bird, treat us like a child, dress us like a man - and then expect us to act like a lady. — Elizabeth Gurley Flynn

I care. I care a lot. I think of Cosmopolitan all day, and I run scared. So it's a combination of fright, caring and anxiety. — Helen Gurley Brown

herself from the rains. But through the raw and broken trees she could see the valley, faint beneath a gelatinous fog. She's all but certain that she's falling toward the very same — Jason Gurley

A man likes to sleep with a brainy girl. She's a challenge. If he makes good with her, he figures he must be good himself. — Helen Gurley Brown

Money,if it does not bring you happiness,it will atleast help you be miserable in comfort — Helen Gurley Brown

And it is miserable to think that this is what adulthood is like: two people, cowering behind their grief, lashing out at each other like injured animals. — Jason Gurley

Every morning when I'm thrashing around on the floor doing my solid hour of heavy exercises I'm not really doing that for anyone but myself. It makes me feel good. — Helen Gurley Brown

Cutting a person's throat is not as easy as I thought it would be. — Jason Gurley

because when a person has a dream that they've dreamed of their whole life, and they don't get a single chance to accomplish it in the single life that belongs to them, they just sort of wither inside, — Jason Gurley

I guess I'm a survivor. There are many of us survivors and any successful woman of my age has somewhat of that in her. — Helen Gurley Brown

Two warm bodies and one cold bottle of champagne will produce something more wonderful than would happen without the champagne. — Helen Gurley Brown

There is no fear in Silicon Valley right now, — Bill Gurley

benches - she was possessive of her mornings, of the quiet before her day became a thing owned by other people - but — Jason Gurley

Having an investor on your board of directors who is naive about public markets or finds them complex or scary is non-optimal. — Bill Gurley

I think one thing that may have happened with both Facebook and Zynga is that they may have waited too long to go public. They got particularly cute on that front. — Bill Gurley

I think one of the key differentiators I bring to the table as a venture capitalist is a solid understanding of the public markets and how they operate. — Bill Gurley

It's unrealistic to think you can only have one good product. People are not that poor. They can buy what they want. — Helen Gurley Brown

What is a labour victory? I maintain that it is a twofold thing. Workers must gain economic advantage, but they must also gain revolutionary spirit, in order to achieve a complete victory. For workers to gain a few cents more a day, a few minutes less a day, and go back to work with the same psychology, the same attitude toward society is to achieve a temporary gain and not a lasting victory. — Elizabeth Gurley Flynn

an atom, and the resulting detonation blinded them all. — Jason Gurley

What I really want is a creative person. You can always hire a Ph.D. to take care of the details. — Richard Gurley Drew

Nearly every glamorous, wealthy, successful career woman you might envy now started out as some kind of schlep. — Helen Gurley Brown

Venture capital is unscalable. Production equals the time each partner has. — Bill Gurley

I guess anyone with a beautiful body, man or woman, loves to be looked at, but to admit such a thing is a little rough at times. That's why it's hard to get people to pose. — Helen Gurley Brown

Work with the raw material you have, namely you, and never let up. — Helen Gurley Brown

I think a single woman's biggest problem is coping with the people who are trying to marry her off! — Helen Gurley Brown

You can't make money with a consensus accurate prediction — Bill Gurley

The first time you went to eBay, you probably didn't do a transaction. — Bill Gurley

a well of beauty tucked away inside the girl, masked by drawn expressions and tired shoulders. She carries unseen weights. — Jason Gurley

And that may be [Helen Gurley] Brown's most enlightened lesson: that sexual autonomy and fulfillment are inseparable from the autonomy and fulfillment that a woman gets from her career. — Judith Thurman

My father died when I was 10; my sister got polio a couple of years later and was paralyzed. So there I was - my sister in a wheel chair, my father gone, and my mother a quiet little mouse. You see, it was the '30s in the South, so my mother was not prepared to cope. So I was scared to death. And being that scared, everything afterward became a struggle not to go down the drain. Struggling became a way of life for me. — Helen Gurley Brown

Some bosses are so greedy (for themselves only) they forget underlings are not thirteenth-century peasants who can be satisfied with a glass of mead and three festivals a year. — Helen Gurley Brown

If you're not a sex object, you're in trouble. — Helen Gurley Brown

It's not for everybody to tweet, it's for everybody to follow. The more people figure that out, they see it's RSS-plus. It's literally the place you check for information. — Bill Gurley

Feed the alligators and you get bigger alligators. — Helen Gurley Brown

There should be someone in the world who loves you despite you," she whispers to her mother. — Jason Gurley

Now it's somewhat easier for a woman to be a film producer or something like that if she wants, though it's not that easy. But to be any kind of successful woman took a lot of doing in the '30s, '40s, '50s, '60s ... in the '70s it's getting simpler. — Helen Gurley Brown

I admit I get the occasional headache," I said. "I admit some of my hangovers are epic. But usually all it takes for me to bounce back is a sauna, cold-plunge pool, steam bath, massage, and wasabi to clear the sinuses". — George Gurley

It's really hard to run a business against somebody who is not acting as if it were in business. — Bill Gurley

History has a long-range perspective. It ultimately passes stern judgment on tyrants and vindicates those who fought, suffered, were imprisoned, and died for human freedom, against political oppression and economic slavery. — Elizabeth Gurley Flynn

This is how the darkness is. It knows nothing else. It fills crevices, pushing into the finest, narrowest corners, ascribing no meaning to the events that it carries, but birthing and then swallowing them again as they expire. — Jason Gurley

Reality is a terrific drug. — Jason Gurley

Feeling insecure is good for you. It forces you to do something better, drives you to use all your talents. — Helen Gurley Brown

She cannot relax. The world around her is a living, breathing metaphor. The boat is her mother's frail body, groaning under Eleanor's weight. The sea is the poison that waits below, ready to consume her when she stumbles. The island is death, and she carves a resolute path - "a straight shot," as Jack said - to death's very door. Eleanor — Jason Gurley

You can have your titular recognition. I'll take money and power. — Helen Gurley Brown

I think I'm a fairly average person, I think I have only a medium IQ. I didn't go to college, obviously. — Helen Gurley Brown

I have never seen Jeff Bezos, Marc Benioff, or Reed Hastings complain about being public. Nor have they ever argued that being public prevented them from doing things with a long-term focus. — Bill Gurley

Over the past 10 years, the majority of value creation in the venture community has been in consumer Internet. — Bill Gurley

Time is a river, and it flows in a circle. I love you. — Jason Gurley

You know you can't hope yourself a better life - you must take yourself there. — Helen Gurley Brown

There are so many demons. Agnes tips the bottle back and her eyes flutter closed, and she swallows, and swallows again, and the burn of it tells her it will be okay, that everything will be just fine, because the burn is always followed by the dark, and the dark is followed by - Peace. Or something very much like it. She drinks, and eventually her grip loosens on the bottle, and she slips into that dark where Esmerelda, where Eleanor, where nobody else is permitted. — Jason Gurley

The only thing that separates successful people from the ones who aren't is the willingness to work very, very hard. — Helen Gurley Brown

My success was not based so much on any great intelligence but on great common sense. — Helen Gurley Brown

No one's fearful, everyone's greedy, and it will eventually end. — Bill Gurley

Every space movie has a nutjob on the space ship, Henry says. And until you kill the nutjob, everybody's in danger. — Jason Gurley

Most souls wait for a very long time. In the end, the peace they seek is usually within themselves, not within the confines of the world they left. — Jason Gurley

The wage-earning class the world over are the victims of society. — Elizabeth Gurley Flynn

If I had to choose between sex and food, I would choose food, but I'd choose sex over nearly everything else. — Helen Gurley Brown

The IWW [Industrial Workers of the World] has been accused of pushing women to the front. This is not true. Rather, the women have not been kept in back, and so they have naturally moved to the front. — Elizabeth Gurley Flynn

We are told to value ourselves without feedback, but if nobody is making a pass at you or trying to take you to Bermuda, how are you supposed to feel? Confident? — Helen Gurley Brown

Silicon Valley is way more correlated with Nasdaq than anyone admits. — Bill Gurley

The prerequisite for making love is to like someone enormously. — Helen Gurley Brown

Laugh a little when the joke's on you — Helen Gurley Brown

A labor victory must be economic and it must be revolutionizing. — Elizabeth Gurley Flynn

I think you keep two sets of books. In one set, you record the truth
how well you are really doing. This is the secret set
just for you and loved ones. In the other set are more modest entries and statements, and these are for public consumption! — Helen Gurley Brown

Good girls go to heaven, bad girls go everywhere. — Helen Gurley Brown

Never expect anybody - except possibly your analyst - to be as thrilled about your sex life as you are. — Helen Gurley Brown