You cannot get yourself from point A to B if you insist on staying where you are.
A simple thought, but not many can get behind that simple sentence and apply it in their real-life endeavors because they are too afraid to take risks toward change.
But here we have the concept of Kaizen, a Japanese term that translates to “improvement” or “good change” that many individuals use as a philosophy to push themselves or their team forward by believing that small and positive changes are the key to significant development.
If you want to see evident progress in your life, whether it be with you as a person or improving your team's morale at work, then embracing the ideology of Kaizen is the way to go.
To help you get inspired with this kind of practice, here are some Kaizen quotes for you to dive into.
Scroll on and enjoy!
Kaizen Quotes That Will Inspire You
1. “Never stop investing. Never stop improving. Never stop doing something new. Make it your goal to be better each and every day, in some small way. Remember the Japanese concept of Kaizen. Small daily improvements eventually result in huge advantages.” — Bob Parsons
2. “Continuous improvement is not about the things you do well — that’s work. Continuous improvement is about removing the things that get in the way of your work. The headaches, the things that slow you down, that’s what continuous improvement is all about.” — Bruce Hamilton
3. “Persistence, perseverance, and continuous improvement are the ingredients for forming a successful person.” — Debasish Mridha
4. “There’s no limit to the possible expansion of each one of us.” — Charles Schwab
5. “Fall seven times. Stand up eight.” — Japanese Proverb
6. “Average ones compete with others. Great ones compete with themselves.” — Vadim Kotelnikov
7. “The distance between number one and number two is always a constant. If you want to improve the organization, you have to improve yourself and the organization gets pulled up with you.” — Indra Nooyi
8. “The Hacker Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration. Hackers believe that something can always be better and that nothing is ever complete.” — Mark Zuckerberg
9. “The message of the Kaizen strategy is that not a day should go by without some kind of improvement being made somewhere in the company.” — Masaaki Imai
10. “Do what you can on this plane to relieve suffering by constantly working on yourself to be an instrument for the cessation of suffering. To me, that’s what the emerging game is all about.” — Ram Dass
11. “Quality is never an accident; it is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, intelligent direction and skillful execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives.” — William A Foster
12. “Strive for continuous improvement, instead of perfection.” — Kim Collins
13. “Work hard at your job and you can make a living. Work hard on yourself and you can make a fortune.” — Jim Rohn
14. “My good friend, you are a citizen of Athens, a city which is very great and very famous for its wisdom and power – are you not ashamed of caring so much for the making of money and for fame and prestige, when you neither think nor care about wisdom and truth and the improvement of your soul?” — Plato
15. “Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all” — Dale Carnegie
16. “Excellence is a continuous process and not an accident.” — A.P.J. Abdul Kalam
17. “Be the change you want to see.” — Mahatma Gandhi
18. “We are always pregnant with a truer version of ourselves.” — Marianne Williamson
19. “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” — Antoine de Saint Exupery
20. “If you think of standardization as the best that you know today, but which is to be improved tomorrow; you get somewhere.” — Henry Ford
21. “Kaizen is like a hotbed that nurtures small and ongoing changes, while innovation is like magma that appears in abrupt eruptions from time to time.” — Masaaki Imai
22. “Measurement is the first step that leads to control and eventually to improvement. If you can’t measure something, you can’t understand it. If you can’t understand it, you can’t control it. If you can’t control it, you can’t improve it.” — H. James Harrington
23. “Practice the philosophy of continuous improvement. Get a little bit better every single day.” — Brian Tracy
24. “If I had one hour to save the world, I would spend fifty-five minutes defining the problem and only five minutes finding the solution.” — Albert Einstein
25. “The more you teach positive ideas to others, the better you learn them yourself.” — Brian Tracy
26. “Kaizen and innovation are the two major strategies people use to create change. Where innovation demands shocking and radical reform, all kaizen asks is that you take small, comfortable steps toward improvement.” — Robert D. Maurer
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Kaizen Quotes To Push You Towards Growth
27. “No matter how good you get you can always get better, and that’s the exciting part.” — Tiger Woods
28. “We cannot become what we want to be by remaining what we are.” — Max DePree
29. “Before you say you can’t do something…TRY IT.” — Sakichi Toyoda
30. “Learn continually – There is always one more thing to learn.” — Steve Jobs
31. “I’m never satisfied with what I do. I always think I can do it a lot better.” — Michael Jackson
32. “You can’t just be you. You have to double yourself. You have to read books on subjects you know nothing about. You have to travel to places you never thought of traveling. You have to meet every kind of person and endlessly stretch what you know.” — Mary Wells Lawrence
33. “You’re always getting a perfect vibrational match to what you predominantly give your attention to. But you’ve got to make the best of it. You’ve got to vibrate slightly different from where you are if you are going to improve where you are. You can’t keep taking score of where your business is or your relationship is or your body is without continuing to create it as it is. To make improvement, you’ve got to reach for a different thought” — Esther Hicks
34. “If we’re really committed to growth, we never stop discovering new dimensions of self and self-expression.” — Oprah Winfrey
35. “Something is wrong if workers do not look around each day, find things that are tedious or boring, and then rewrite the procedures. Even last month’s manual should be out of date.” — Taiichi Ohno
36. “People grow through experience if they meet life honestly and courageously. This is how character is built.” — Eleanor Roosevelt
37. “An act of leadership is to say that whatever’s happening now is not good enough and suggest or show that we can do better. If you don’t have that, then you don’t have the catalyst for continuous improvement.” — David J. Anderson
38. “One key to successful leadership is continuous personal change. Personal change is a reflection of our inner growth and empowerment.” — Robert E. Quinn
39. “Excellent firms don’t believe in excellence – only in constant improvement and constant change.” — Tom Peters
40. “To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.” — Winston Churchill
41. “A corporation is a living organism; it has to continue to shed its skin. Methods have to change. Focus has to change. Values have to change. The sum total of those changes is transformation.” — Andrew Grove
42. “A good objective of leadership is to help those who are doing poorly to do well and to help those who are doing well to do even better.” — Jim Rohn
43. “I do not think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday.” — Abraham Lincoln
44. “A person and an organization must have goals, take actions to achieve those goals, gather evidence of achievement, study and reflect on the data and from that take actions again. Thus, they are in a continuous feedback spiral toward continuous improvement. This is what ‘Kaizan’ means.” — W. Edwards Deming
Kaizen Quotes That Will Spark Your Motivation
45. “Learning is not compulsory; it’s voluntary. Improvement is not compulsory; it’s voluntary. But to survive, we must learn.” — W. Edwards Deming
46. “Without change, there is no innovation, creativity or incentive for improvement.” — William Pollard
47. “The common question that gets asked in business is, ‘why?’ That’s a good question, but an equally valid question is, ‘why not?’” — Jeff Bezos
48. “We conquer by continuing.” — George Matheson
49. “The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks and starting on the first one.”
— Mark Twain
50. “To succeed in this world, you have to change all the time.” — Sam Walton
51. “If you define the problem correctly, you almost have the solution.” — Steve Jobs
52. “Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power.” — Laozi
53. “If you will keep being your best right where you are, you will come into more favor, promotion and opportunity than you ever imagined.” — Joel Osteen
54. “If a company isn’t continuously improving then it is slowly dying.” — Dave Waters
55. “Patience is a competitive advantage. In most fields, you can find success if you are simply willing to do the reasonable thing longer than most people.” — James Clear
56. “The only way of finding the limits of the possible is by going beyond them into the impossible.” — Arthur C. Clarke
57. “Without change there is no innovation, creativity, or incentive for improvement. Those who initiate change will have a better opportunity to manage the change that is inevitable.” — William Pollard
58. “The thing is, continuity of strategic direction and continuous improvement in how you do things are absolutely consistent with each other. In fact, they’re mutually reinforcing.” — Michael Porter
59. “Perfection is not attainable. But if we chase perfection, we can catch excellence.” — Vince Lombardi
60. “It is impossible to improve any process until it is standardized. If the process is shifting from here to there, then any improvement will just be one more variation that is occasionally used and mostly ignored. One must standardize, and thus stabilize the process, before continuous improvement can be made.” — Masaaki Imai
61. “Cultivate Curiosity. If you really want to grow in your lifetime, learn to be as inquisitive as a child. Curious people are never bored, and for them life becomes an unending study of joy.” — Tony Robbins
62. “It’s a great thing about being a musician; you don’t stop until the day you die, you can improve. So it’s a wonderful thing to do.” — Marcus Miller
63. “I don’t worry about maintaining the quality of my life, because every day I work on improving it.” — Tony Robbins
64. “Improvement begins with I.” — Arnold H. Glasow
65. “The biggest room in the world is the room for improvement.” — Helmut Schmidt
Kaizen Quotes That Will Improve Your Mindset
66. “Don’t say it can not be done, rather say, you don’t know how to do it yet.” — Tomas Bata
67. “There are no big problems. There are just a lot of little problems.” — Henry Ford
68. “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but habit.” — Aristotle
69. “Complacency is the forerunner of mediocrity. You can never work too hard on attitudes, effort and technique.” — Don Meyer
70. “Once I slow down because I think I have reached my peak, then my skills will go nowhere but down.” — Bruce Lee
71. “Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle.” — Martin Luther King, Jr.
72. “A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.” — Sir Winston Churchill
73. “Success is a process that continues, not a status that you reach. If you are alive, there are lessons to be learned.” — Denis Waitley
74. “Some people don’t like change, but you need to embrace change if the alternative is disaster.” — Elon Musk
75. “Knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes.” — Peter Drucker
76. “If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing.” — W. Edwards Deming
77. “Most people spend more time and energy going around problems than in trying to solve them.” — Henry Ford
78. “Everything can be improved.” — Clarence W. Barron
79. “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.” — Henry Ford
80. “You always want to be better than you are. No matter what, I think that’s important.” — Blake Griffin
81. “Releasing guilt is like removing a huge weight from your shoulders. Guilt is released through the empowering thought of love and respect for yourself. Let go of standards of perfection and refuse to use up the precious currency of your life, the now, with thoughts that continue to frustrate and weaken you. Instead, vow to be better than you used to be, which is the true test of nobility.” — Wayne Dyer
82. “In order to be happy, human beings must feel they are continuing to grow. Clearly, we must adopt the concept of continuous improvement as a daily principle.” — Tony Robbins
83. “In terms of changes, the spiritual mentors teach me that I must not forget those relating primarily to improve myself.” — Chico Xavier
84. “I think it’s very important to have a feedback loop, where you’re constantly thinking about what you’ve done and how you could be doing it better.” — Elon Musk
85. “Costs do not exist to be calculated. Costs exist to be reduced.” — Taiichi Ohno
86. “Almost all quality improvement comes via simplification of design, manufacturing… layout, processes, and procedures.” — Tom Peters
87. “Manage the cause, not the result.” — W.E Deming
88. “The most dangerous kind of waste is the waste we do not recognize.” — Shigeo Shingo
89. “I’m always trying to get better. There’s always room for improvement.” — Cain Velasquez
90. “Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection.” — Mark Twain
Kaizen Quotes To Live By Everyday
91. “Improvement usually means doing something that we have never done before.” — Shigeo Shingo
92. “The man who makes no mistakes does not usually make anything.” — E.J. Phelps
93. “Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.” — Steve Jobs
94. “We know what we are, but know not what we may be.” — William Shakespeare
95. “This is bravery: using the challenge of daily life to sharpen our mind and open our heart.” — Sakyong Mipham
96. “A relentless barrage of “why’s” is the best way to prepare your mind to pierce the clouded veil of thinking caused by the status quo. Use it often.” — Shigeo Shingo
97. “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.” — Peter F. Drucker
98. “Watch the little things; a small leak will sink a great ship.” — Benjamin Franklin
99. “You can’t do kaizen just once or twice and expect immediate results. You have to be in it for the long haul.” — Masaaki Imai
100. “Small daily improvements over time lead to stunning results.” — Robin Sharma
101. “What get measured, gets managed.” — Peter Drucker
102. “Great things are done by a series of small things brought together.” — Vincent Van Gogh
103. “An extraordinary life is all about daily, continuous improvements in the areas that matter most.” — Robin Sharma
104. “Pause and remember – Every single event in your life, especially the difficult lessons, have made you smarter, stronger, and wiser than you were yesterday. Be thankful!” — Jennifer Young
105. “He who rejects change is the architect of decay.” — Harold Wilson
106.“Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning.” — Benjamin Franklin
107. “I can do nothing for you but work on myself…you can do nothing for me but work on yourself!” — Ram Dass
108. “Don’t settle for mediocrity; never let good enough be good enough.” — Joel Osteen
109. “The world we have created is a product of our thinking; it cannot be changed without changing our thinking.” — Albert Einstein
110. “If you do not know how to ask the right question, you discover nothing.” — W. Edwards Deming
111. “The journey is never ending. There’s always gonna be growth, improvement, adversity; you just gotta take it all in and do what’s right, continue to grow, continue to live in the moment.” — Antonio Brown
What’s Your Favorite Kaizen Quote?
One must believe that progress isn’t just a one-time, three-step thing that we can achieve easily.
It’s a never-ending path to take because there will always be a chance for us to do even more and be better, no matter where we are in life.
Simply put, Kaizen believes that anything can be pushed toward greatness as long as we have the patience and determination to consistently do the things that help us improve.
Which one of these Kaizen quotes resonated with you the best?
Let us know in the comments!
Alan is the founder of Subconscious Servant. He has a passion for learning about topics such as spirituality and the metaphysical world. The thing he loves to explore most though is manifesting with the law of attraction ✨.