"A business like an automobile, has to be driven, in order to get results.""A shady business never yields a sunny life.""Better to be occasionally cheated than perpetually suspicious.""Books are like a mirror. If an ass looks in, you can't expect an angel to look out.""Difficulties should act as a tonic. They should spur us to greater exertion.""Golf without bunkers and hazards would be tame and monotonous. So would life.""He best keeps from anger who remembers that God is always looking upon him.""He who has faith has... an inward reservoir of courage, hope, confidence, calmness, and assuring trust that all will come out well - even though to the world it may appear to come out most badly.""History has demonstrated that the most notable winners usually encountered heartbreaking obstacles before they triumphed. They won because they refused to become discouraged by their defeats.""If you don't drive your business, you will be driven out of business.""It is only the farmer who faithfully plants seeds in the Spring, who reaps a harvest in the Autumn.""Jealousy... is a mental cancer.""Many a man thinks he is patient when, in reality, he is indifferent.""Real riches are the riches possessed inside.""The bargain that yields mutual satisfaction is the only one that is apt to be repeated.""The man who has done his level best... is a success, even though the world may write him down a failure.""The man who has won millions at the cost of his conscience is a failure.""The truth doesn't hurt unless it ought to.""There is more credit and satisfaction in being a first-rate truck driver than a tenth-rate executive.""To make headway, improve your head.""Turn resolutely to work, to recreation, or in any case to physical exercise till you are so tired you can't help going to sleep, and when you wake up you won't want to worry.""What you have outside you counts less than what you have inside you.""Work is the meat of life, pleasure the dessert."
He was born in New Deer, Aberdeenshire, in Scotland. After studying at University of Dundee, in 1897 Forbes worked as a reporter and editorial writer with a local Dundee newspaper until 1901 when he moved to Johannesburg, South Africa, where he founded the Rand Daily Mail. He emigrated to New York City in the United States in 1904 where he was employed as a writer and financial editor at the Journal of Commerce before joining the Hearst chain of newspapers as a syndicated columnist in 1911. He left Hearst after two years to become the business and financial editor at the New York American where he remained until 1916.
He founded Forbes magazine in 1917 and remained Editor-in-Chief until his death in New York City in 1954, though assisted in his later years by Bruce Charles Forbes (1916-1964) and Malcolm Stevenson Forbes (1919-1990), his two eldest sons.
He was the founder of the Investors League in 1942. He died on May 6, 1954.
