Business Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

We are lost, lost,' said Gollum. 'No name, no business, no Precious, nothing. Only empty. Only hungry; yes, we are hungry. A few little fishes, nasty bony little fishes, for a poor creature, and they say death. So wise they are; so just, so very just

J. R. R. Tolkien

I call investing the greatest business in the world … because you never have to swing. You stand at the plate, the pitcher throws you General Motors at 47! U.S. Steel at 39! and nobody calls a strike on you. There's no penalty except opportunity lost. All day you wait for the pitch you like; then when the fielders are asleep, you step up and hit it.

As for the imperialist countries, we should unite with their peoples and strive to coexist peacefully with those countries, do business with them and prevent any possible war, but under no circumstances should we harbour any unrealistic notions about them.

It is the most ungodly and dangerous business to abandon the certain and revealed will of God in order to search in to the hidden mysteries of God.

Good PR educates people; that's all it is. You can't con people in this business. The products speak for themselves.

Our business is to wake up. We have to find ways in which to detect the whole of reality in the one illusory part which our self-centered consciousness permits us to see. We must not live thoughtlessly, taking our illusion for the complete reality, but at the same time we must not live too thoughtfully in the sense of trying to escape from the dream state. We must be continuously on watch for ways in which we may enlarge our consciousness.

A fortified town is like a man cased in the heavy armor of antiquity, with a horse-load of broadswords and small arms slung to him, endeavoring to go about his business.

Henry David Thoreau

Unhappy events abroad have retaught us two simple truths about the liberty of a democratic people. The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic State itself. That, in its essence, is fascism — ownership of government by an individual, by a group or by any other controlling private power.
The second truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if its business system does not provide employment and produce and distribute goods in such a way as to sustain an acceptable standard of living. Both lessons hit home. Among us today a concentration of private power without equal in history is growing.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

So much for industry, my friends, and attention to one's own business; but to these we must add frugality if we would make our industry more certainly successful. A man may, if he knows not how to save as he gets, keep his nose all his life to the grindstone, and die not worth a grout at last.

Benjamin Franklin

There should be relentless exposure of and attack upon every evil practice, whether in politics, in business, or in social life. I hail as a benefactor every writer or speaker, every man who, on the platform, or in book, magazine or newspaper, with merciless severity makes such attack, provided always that he in his turn remembers that the attack is of use only if it is absolutely truthful.

Theodore Roosevelt

You can dramatize your ideas in business or in any other aspect of your life. It's easy

The worst sort of business is one that grows rapidly, requires significant capital to engender the growth, and then earns little or no money. Think airlines. Here a durable competitive advantage has proven elusive ever since the days of the Wright Brothers. Indeed, if a farsighted capitalist had been present at Kitty Hawk, he would have done his successors a huge favor by shooting Orville down.

The Swiss who are not a people so much as a neat clean small quite solvent business.

William Faulkner

My business was great, and in such a case as mine a man may strain courtesy.

William Shakespeare

The mother is the one supreme asset of national life; she is more important by far than the successful statesman, or business man, or artist, or scientist.

Theodore Roosevelt

That which Heraclitus avoided, however, is still the same at that which we shun today: the noise and democratic chatter of the Ephesians, their politics, their latest news of the Empire, … their market business of today —for we philosophers need to be spared one thing above all: everything to do with today. We reverence what is still, cold, noble, distant, past, and in general everything in the face of which the soul does not have to defend itself and wrap itself up.

Friedrich Nietzsche

He was one of those quite rare adults who communicate with small children fairly well and who love them all impartially—not in a sugary way but in a businesslike fashion that may sometimes entail a hug, in the same way that closing a big business deal may call for a handshake.

Then why flounder around waiting for good business? Get the costs down by better management. Get the prices down to the buying power.

Pay attention only to the form; emotion will come spontaneously to inhabit it. A perfect dwelling always finds an inhabitant. The artist's business is to build the dwelling; as for the inhabitant, it is up to the reader to provide him.

I have made the tough decisions, always with an eye toward the bottom line. Perhaps it's time America was run like a business.

In their hearts women think that it is men's business to earn money and theirs to spend it.

Arthur Schopenhauer

It is the main earthly business of a human being to make his home, and the immediate surroundings of his home, as symbolic and significant to his own imagination as he can.

G. K. Chesterton

I sincerely wish war was a pleasanter and easier business than it is, but it does not admit of holidays.

Abraham Lincoln

This business of the working class is on its way out I think. After all, aren't I working class? I work jolly hard, I can tell you.

Margaret Thatcher

Let your secret sympathies and your compassion be always with the under dog in the fight — this is magnanimity; but bet on the other one — this is business.