Business Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

We will proceed no further in this business:
He hath honoured me of late; and I have bought
Golden opinions from all sorts of people.

William Shakespeare

Trade curses everything it handles, and though you trade in messages from heaven, the whole curse of trade attaches to the business.

Henry David Thoreau

Commercial concerns have expanded from family business to corporate wealth which is self-perpetuating and which enlightened statesmen and economists now dread as the most potent oligarchy yet produced.

The idea that a baby doesn't amount to anything! Why, one baby is just a house and a front yard full by itself. One baby can, furnish more business than you and your whole Interior Department can attend to. He is enterprising, irrepressible, brimful of lawless activities.

A man of business will often deceive you without the slightest scruple, but he will absolutely refuse to commit a theft.

Arthur Schopenhauer

I don't like firing people. It's not a pleasant thing and it's sad.... In some cases, it's a terrible, terrible situation for the person who gets fired, how strongly they take it. So it's not something that any rational or sane person can love doing, but it also happens to be a fact of life in business.

Neither my place, nor aught I heard of business,
Hath raised me from my bed; nor doth the general care
Take hold on me; for my particular grief
Is of so floodgate and o'erbearing nature
That it engluts and swallows other sorrows,
And it is still itself.

William Shakespeare

The best business returns are usually achieved by companies that are doing something quite similar today to what they were doing five or ten years ago.

To talk in public, to think in solitude, to read and to hear, to inquire and answer inquiries, is the business of the scholar

A living dog is better than a dead lion. Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies, and not be the biggest pygmy that he can? Let every one mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he was made. Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

Henry David Thoreau

This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business, law or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard.

Prosperous farmers mean more employment, more prosperity for the workers and the business men of every industrial area in the whole country.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

I consider a country-dance as an emblem of marriage. Fidelity and complaisance are the principle duties of both; and those men who do not choose to dance or to marry them selves, have no business with the partners or wives of the neighbors.

There is more business in interpreting interpretations than in interpreting things, and more books on books than on any other subject: all we do is gloss each other. All is a-swarm with commentaries: of authors there is a dearth.

Michel de Montaigne

Be subtle! be subtle! and use your spies for every kind of business.

That is the true genius of America, a faith in the simple dreams of its people, the insistence on small miracles. That we can say what we think, write what we think, without hearing a sudden knock on the door. That we can have an idea and start our own business without paying a bribe or hearing a sudden knock on the door. That we can participate in the political process without fear of retribution, and that our votes will be counted — or at least, most of the time.

When I started Virgin from a basement in west London, there was no great plan or strategy. I didn't set out to build a business empire... For me, building a business is all about doing something to be proud of, bringing talented people together and creating something that's going to make a real difference to other people's lives

Richard Branson

Every depression is a challenge to every manufacturer to put more brains into his business.

You can never go too far wrong by thinking like a customer who's new to the business.

Richard Branson

Business is a noble vocation, directed to producing wealth and improving the world. It can be a fruitful source of prosperity for the area in which it operates, especially if it sees the creation of jobs as an essential part of its service to the common good. This common good also includes the earth... the environmental challenge we are undergoing, and its human roots, concern and affect us all.

Writing is a lonely job. Even if a writer socializes regularly, when he gets down to the real business of his life, it is he and his type writer or word processor. No one else is or can be involved in the matter.

I'll tell you why I like the cigarette business. … It costs a penny to make. Sell it for a dollar. It's addictive. And there's fantastic brand loyalty.

Mr. Pickwick took a seat and the paper, but instead of reading the latter, peeped over the top of it, and took a survey of the man of business, who was an elderly, pimply-faced, vegetable-diet sort of man, in a black coat, dark mixture trousers, and small black gaiters; a kind of being who seemed to be an essential part of the desk at which he was writing, and to have as much thought or sentiment.

Charles Dickens

Law is nothing else but the best reason of wise men applied for ages to the transactions and business of mankind.

Abraham Lincoln

It is not unique to Africa — corruption exists all over the world, including in the United States. But here in Africa, corruption drains billions of dollars from economies that can't afford to lose billions of dollars — that's money that could be used to create jobs and build hospitals and schools. And when someone has to pay a bribe just to start a business or go to school, or get an official to do the job they're supposed to be doing anyway — that's not the African way. It undermines the dignity of the people you represent.