Quotes on Business

If you work just for money, you'll never make it, but if you love what you're doing and you always put the customer first, success will be yours.

A successful man is one who can lay a firm foundation with the bricks others have thrown at him.

If you can get the inside right, the outside will fall into place.

Rather than having small smart tricks to get by, focus on holding on and persevering.

Success and profitability are outcomes of focusing on customers and employees, not objectives.

We believe that business is good because it creates value. It is ethical because it is based on voluntary exchange; it is noble because it can elevate our existence, and it is heroic because it lifts people out of poverty and creates prosperity.

Values-based business behavior is no longer simply an interesting option - it's crucial to your survival. Once you understand your mission and values, you have a strong basis for evaluating your practices and aligning them accordingly.

Learning to be an effective leader is no different than learning to be an effective person. And that's the hard part

The whole point of getting things done is knowing what to leave undone.

I'm not out to preach. I just live my own life. I'm very happy if I can help somebody - that's wonderful. But it's up to them what they want to think about it or what they want to take away; it's their business, not mine.

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.

Commerce is so far from being beneficial to arts, or to empire, that it is destructive of both, as all their history shows, for the above reason of individual merit being its great hatred. Empires flourish till they become commercial, and then they are scattered abroad to the four winds.

Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones. It is not fair. He has fame and profit enough as a poet, and should not be taking the bread out of the mouths of other people.

You've got to say, "I think that if I keep working at this and want it badly enough I can have it." It's called perseverance.

I see business as an ecosystem.

Every young man would do well to remember that all successful business stands on the foundation of morality.

When we're in the business of picking fights with our allies instead of working with them, that takes away from our strength in dealing with China.

Twenty years ago, I wrote a book called 'It Takes a Village.' And a lot of people looked at the title and asked, 'What the heck do you mean by that?' This is what I mean. None of us can raise a family, build a business, heal a community or lift a country totally alone.

Accept business only at a price permitting thoroughness. Then do a thorough job, regardless of cost to us.

Such is the brutalization of commercial ethics in this country that no one can feel anything more delicate than the velvet touch of a soft buck.

Expect nothing. Live frugally on surprise.