Business

"Every great man of business has got somewhere a touch of the idealist in him."

"Business has to be fun. For too many people, it's "just a job.""

"The best way to support dreams and stretch is to set apart small ideas with big potential, then give people positive role models and the resources to turn small projects into big businesses."

"I remember that a wise friend of mine did usually say, "That which is everybody's business is nobody's business.""

"I have laid aside business, and gone a-fishing."

"{{cite web |url=https://www.innovolo.co.uk/article/just-because-there-is-a-gap-in-the-market-doesnt-mean-there-is-a-market-in-the-ga |title=Just because there's a gap in the market, doesn't mean there's a market in the gap. |author= |authorlink= |coauthors= |date= |year=2022 |month=January"

"Most of those who say so easily that this is our way out do not, I am convinced, understand that fundamental changes of attitude, new disciplines, revised legal structures, unaccustomed limitations on activity, are all necessary if we are to plan. This amounts, in fact, to the abandonment, finally, of laissez faire. It amounts, practically, to the abolition of "business"."

"Most are engaged in business the greater part of their lives, because the soul abhors a vacuum and they have not discovered any continuous employment for man's nobler faculties."

"I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself, than this incessant business."

"When the going gets tough, the tough get going."

"Cujuslibet tu fidem in pecunia perspiceres, Verere ei verba credere?"

"Omnibus nobis ut res dant sese, ita magni atque humiles sumus."

"Par negotiis neque supra."

"Men of great parts are often unfortunate in the management of public business, because they are apt to go out of the common road by the quickness of their imagination."

"Organizations are defined from the inside out: they are described by who reports to whom, by departments and processes and matrices and perks. A business, on the other hand, is defined from the outside in by markets, suppliers, customers, and competitors."

"Of course, there's a different law for the rich and the poor: otherwise, who would go into business?"

"No man tastes pleasures truly, who does not earn them by previous business; and few people do business well, who do nothing else."

"O brave youth, how good for thee it were couldst thou be made to understand how infinitely precious are thy school years—years when thou hast leisure to grow, when new worlds break in upon thee, and thou fashionest thy being in the light of the ideals of truth and goodness and beauty! If now thou dost not fit thyself to become free and whole, thou shalt, when the doors of this fair mother-house of the mind, close behind thee, be driven into ways that lead to bondage, be compelled to do that which cripples and dwarfs; for the work whereby men gain a livelihood involves mental and moral mutilation, unless it be done in the spirit of religion and culture. Ah! well for thee, canst thou learn while yet there is time that it will profit thee nothing to become the possessor of millions, if the price thou payest is thy manhood."

"It is held that one fulfils his whole duty when he is industrious in his business or vocation, observing also the decencies of domestic, civil, and religious life. But activity of this kind stirs only the surface of our being, leaving what is most divine to starve; and when it is made the one important thing, men lose sense for what is high and holy, and become commonplace, mechanical, and hard. Science is valuable for them as a means to comfort and wealth; morality, as an aid to success; religion, as an agent of social order. In their eyes those who devote themselves to ideal aims and ends are as foolish as the alchemists, since the only real world is that of business and politics, or of business simply, since politics is business."

"In business affairs, it is the manner in which even small matters are transacted that often decides man for or against you."

"To business that we love we rise betime, And go to 't with delight."

"A cloud masses, the sky darkens, leaves twist upward, and we know that it will rain. We also know that after the storm, the runoff will feed into groundwater miles away, and the sky will grow clear by tomorrow. All of these events are distant in time and space, if they're all connected within the same pattern. Each has an influence on the rest, and influence that is usually hidden from view. You can only understand the system of rainstorm by contemplating the whole not any part of the pattern. Businesses and other human endeavors are also systems. They, too, are bound by invisible fabrics of interrelated actions, which often take years to fully play out their effects on each other. Since we are part of that lacework ourselves, it's doubly hard to see the whole pattern of change. Instead we tend to focus on snapshots of isolated parts of the system, and wonder why our deepest problems never seem to get resolved."

"Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in a mordant protest written soon after the election, found the intellectual “in a situation he has not known for a generation.” After twenty years of Democratic rule, during which the intellectual had been in the main understood and respected, business had come back into power, bringing with it “the vulgarization which has been the almost invariable consequence of business supremacy.”"

"People are a thousand times more concerned to become wealthy than to acquire mental culture, whereas it is quite certain that what we are contributes much more to our happiness than what we have. Therefore we see very many work from morning to night as industriously as ants and in restless activity to increase the wealth they already have. Beyond the narrow horizon of the means to this end, they know nothing; their minds are a blank and are therefore not susceptible to anything else. The highest pleasures, those of the mind, are inaccessible to them and they try in vain to replace them by the fleeting pleasures of the senses in which they indulge at intervals and which cost little time but much money. If their luck has been good, then as a result they have at the end of their lives a really large amount of money, which they now leave to their heirs either to increase still further or to squander. Such a life, though pursued with a very serious air of importance, is therefore just as foolish as is many another that had for its symbol a fool’s cap."

"It is not a reproach but a compliment to learning, to say, that great scholars are less fit for business; since the truth is, business is so much a lower thing than learning, that a man used to the last cannot easily bring his stomach down to the first."

"Men make it such a point of honour to be fit for business that they forget to examine whether business is fit for a man."

"The first mistake belonging to business is the going into it."

"I never can make out how it is that a knight-errant does not expect to be paid for his trouble, but a peddler-errant always does."

"When men are rightly occupied, their amusement grows out of their work, as the colour-petals out of a fruitful flower;—when they are faithfully helpful and compassionate, all their emotions become steady, deep, perpetual, and vivifying to the soul as the natural pulse to the body. But now, having no true business, we pour our whole masculine energy into the false business of money-making; and having no true emotion, we must have false emotions dressed up for us to play with, not innocently, as children with dolls, but guiltily and darkly."

"We demand that big business give people a square deal; in return we must insist that when any one engaged in big business honestly endeavors to do right, he shall himself be given a square deal."

"The mechanism of modern business is so delicate that extreme care must be taken not to interfere with it in a spirit of rashness or ignorance."

"The business point of view, so called, has been the winding-sheet of many a fine mind."

"[A Jew] should make Torah his principal occupation and his work his casual one. He should minimize his business pursuits and occupy himself with Torah. And he should remove fleeting pleasures from his heart, and work each day enough to maintain himself. ... The rest of the day and night, he should occupy himself with Torah."

"A man of business may talk of philosophy; a man who has none may practice it."

"Socrates makes me admit to myself that, even though I myself am deficient in so many regards, I continue to take no care of myself, but occupy myself with the business of the Athenians."

"Negotii sibi qui volet vim parare, Navem et mulierem, hæc duo comparato. Nam nullæ magis res duæ plus negotii Habent, forte si occeperis exornare. Neque unquam satis hæ duæ res ornantur, Neque eis ulla ornandi satis satietas est."

"Labour as a good soldier of Christ Jesus. No man, being a soldier to God, entangleth himself with secular businesses."

"Ninety-nine men in a hundred are natural men, that is, beasts of prey; and it is mere insanity, in business matters, to deal with a stranger upon any other assumption than that he is a natural man, though we should veil our knowledge of the actual fact by a courteous recognition in words and manners of his better possibilities."

"It is very sad for a man to make himself servant to a thing, his manhood all taken out of him by the hydraulic pressure of excessive business. I should not like to be merely a great doctor, a great lawyer, a great minister, a great politician—I should like to be also something of a man."

"Curse on the man who business first designed, And by't enthralled a freeborn lover's mind!"

"Business is business. There is no special business for man or for woman."

"I don't think that corporations are these big bogeymen that a lot of people paint them to be. … A corporation is a group of people, and if you want to come together for profit or nonprofit, that's your business—whatever you want to do."

"From all business, my favorite case on incentives is Federal Express. The heart and soul of their system — which creates the integrity of the product — is having all their airplanes come to one place in the middle of the night and shift all the packages from plane to plane. If there are delays, the whole operation can't deliver a product full of integrity to Federal Express customers. And it was always screwed up. They could never get it done on time. They tried everything — moral suasion, threats, you name it. And nothing worked. Finally, somebody got the idea to pay all these people not so much an hour, but so much a shift — and when it's all done, they can all go home. Well, their problems cleared up overnight."

"We all learn by imitating, as children, as students, as novices in the world of business. And then we grow up and learn to blend our innate abilities with the rules or principles we have learned."

"Most American men of affairs have learned well the rhetoric of public relations, in some cases even to the point of using it when they are alone, and thus coming to believe it."

"You silly old fool, you don't even know the alphabet of your own silly old business."

"An artisan busies himself with his work for three hours each day and spends nine hours in study."

"Everybody's business is nobody's business."

"In business everyone is out to grab, to fight, to win. Either you are the under or the over dog. It is up to you to be on top."

"There is no better ballast for keeping the mind steady on its keel, and saving it from all risk of crankiness, than business."