The greatest works of literature are those that combine beauty with utility.

I got the idea to start Amazon 16 years ago. I came across the fact that Web usage was growing at 2，300 percent per year. I'd never seen or heard of anything that grew that fast， and the idea of building an online bookstore with millions of titles -- something that simply couldn't exist in the physical world -- was very exciting to me. I had just turned 30 years old， and I'd been married for a year. I told my wife MacKenzie that I wanted to quit my job and go do this crazy thing that probably wouldn't work since most startups don't， and I wasn't sure what would happen after that. MacKenzie (also a Princeton grad and sitting here in the second row) told me I should go for it. As a young boy， I'd been a garage inventor. I'd invented an automatic gate closer out of cement-filled tires， a solar cooker that didn't work very well out of an umbrella and tinfoil， baking-pan alarms to entrap my siblings. I'd always wanted to be an inventor， and she wanted me to follow my passion.

哦，我要做生活的主宰，不是奴隶。

我想那会是一场灾难。外星生命很可能遥遥领先于我们。在我们所处的星球上，先进种族遭遇较为原始人类的历史是不幸的，虽然他们属于同一物种。我觉得我们应当保持低调。

真正的艺术家不是受到启发的人，而是能启发他人的人。