Great Throughts Treasury

"Idleness is the bane of body and mind, the nurse of naughtiness, the chief author of all mischief, one of the seven deadly sins, the cushion upon which the devil chiefly reposes, and a great cause not only of melancholy, but of many other diseases; for the mind is naturally active; and if it be not occupied about some honest business, it rushes into mischief or sinks into melancholy." - Richard Francis Burton, fully Sir Richard Francis Burton

"All animals, except man, know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it - and they do enjoy it as much as man and other circumstances will allow." - Samuel Butler

"Carry religious principles into common life, and common life will lose its transitoriness. The world passes away. The things are seen as temporal. Soon business, with all its cares and anxieties, the whole “unprofitable stir and fever of the world” will be to us a thing of the past. But religion does something better than sigh and moan over the perishableness of earthly things. It finds in them the seeds of immortality." - John Caird

"I have never known a concern to make a decided success that did not do good, honest work, and even in these days of fiercest competition, when everything would seem to be a matter of price, there lies still at the root of great business success the very much more important factor of quality. The effect of attention to quality, upon every man in the service, from the president of the concern down to the humblest laborer, cannot be overestimated." - Andrew Carnegie

"I have always recognized that the object of business is to make money in an honorable manner. I have endeavored to remember that the object of life is to do good." - Peter Cooper

"Every artist undresses his subject whether human or still life. It is his business to find essences in surfaces, and what more attractive and challenging surface than the skin around a soul?" - Richard Corliss, fully Richard Nelson Corliss

"No matter how much work a man can do, no matter how engaging his personality may be, he will not advance far in business if he cannot work through others." -

"There is a master key to success with which no man can fail. Its name is simplicity. Simplicity, I mean, in the sense of reducing to the simplest possible terms every problem that besets us. Whenever I have met a business proposition which, after taking thought, I could not reduce to simplicity, I have left it alone." - Henri Deterding, fully Henri Wilhelm August Deterding

"Be sure to find a place for intellectual and cultural interests outside your daily occupation. It is necessary that you do so if this business of living is not to turn to dust and ashes in your mouth. Moreover, do not overlook the claims of religion as the explanation of an otherwise unintelligible world. It is not the fast tempo of modern life that kills but the boredom, a lack of strong interest and failure to grow that destroy. It is the feeling that nothing is worth while that makes men ill and unhappy." - Harold Willis Dodds

"There is far more danger in public than in private monopoly, for when Government goes into business it can always shift its losses to the taxpayers. Government never makes ends meet - and that is the first requisite of business." -

"The first business of a philosopher is to part with self-conceit." -

"What is the first business of philosophy? To part with self-conceit. For it is impossible for anyone to begin to learn what he thinks that he already knows." -

"A man that knows how to mix pleasures with business, is never entirely possessed by them; he either quits or resumes them at his will; and in the use he makes of them he rather finds a relaxation of mind than a dangerous charm that might corrupt him." - Charles de Saint-Évremond, fully Charles Marguetel de Saint-Denis, seigneur de Évremond

"Not a tenth of us who are in business are doing as well as we could if we merely followed the principles that were known to our grandfathers." - William Feather

"Being a parent used to be on of the most simple, natural, inevitable developments in the world. But nowadays, one has no business being married unless, waking and sleeping, one is conscious of the responsibility." - Abraham Flexner

"Any business arrangement that is not profitable to the other fellow will in the end prove unprofitable for you. The bargain that yields mutual satisfaction is the only one that is apt to be repeated." - B. C. Forbes, fully Bertie Charles "B.C." Forbes

"Government... is neither business, nor technology, nor applied science. It is the art of making men live together in peace and with reasonable happiness." - Felix Frankfurter

"Sloth makes all things difficult, but industry, all things easy. He that rises late must trot all day, and shall scarce overtake his business at night, while laziness travels so slowly that poverty soon overtakes him." - Benjamin Franklin

"When a business firm attempts to mold its whole policy to meet the prices of its competitor that business is entering a labyrinth, the center of which is the chamber of despair. Highest quality never can be given or obtained at the lowest prices. If a price must be sacrificed, quality must be sacrificed. If quality is sacrificed society is not truly served." -

"In the business world, everyone is always working at legitimate cross purposes, governed by self interest." -

"In the business world, everyone is paid in two coins: cash and experience. Take the experience first; the cash will come later." -

"To succeed in a business, to reach the top, an individual must know all it is possible to know about that business." - J. Paul Getty, fully Jean Paul Getty

"Laziness grows on people it begins in cobwebs and ends in iron chains. The more business a man has to do the more he is able to accomplish, for he learns to economize his time." -

"Laziness grows on people; it begins in cobwebs and ends in iron chains. The more business a man has to do the more he is able to accomplish, for he learns to economize his time." - Matthew Hale, fully Sir Matthew Hale

"Punctuality is the soul of business." - Thomas Haliburton, fully Thomas Chandler Haliburton, pseudonym "Sam Slick"

"God will forgive me. That's his business." - Heinrich Heine

"It’s universally wrong to steal from your neighbor, but once you get the one-to-one level, and pit the individual against the multinational conglomerate, the federal bureaucracy, the modern plantation of agro-business, or the utility company, it becomes strictly a value judgment to decide exactly who is stealing from whom. One person’s crime is another person’s profit. Capitalism is license to steal; the government simply regulates who steals and how much." - Abbie Hoffman, fully Abbot Howard "Abbie" Hoffman

"Gossip is always a personal confession of malice or imbecility; it is a low, frivolous, and too often a dirty business. There are neighborhoods where it rages like a pest; churches are split in pieces by it, and neighbor made enemies for life. Let the young avoid or cure it while they may." - Jack Holland

"Let this be understood, then, at starting; that the patient conquest of difficulties which rise in the regular and legitimate channels of business and enterprise is not only essential in securing the success which you seek but it is essential to that preparation of your mind, requisite for the enjoyment of your successes, and for retaining them when gained. So, day by day, and week by week; so month after month, and year after year, work on, and in that progress gain in strength and symmetry, and nerve and knowledge, that when success, patiently and bravely worked for, shall come, it may find you prepared to receive it and keep it." -

"Even if governmental conduct of business could give us more efficiency instead of less efficiency, the fundamental objection to it would remain unaltered and unabated. It would destroy political equality. It would increase rather than decrease abuse and corruption. It would stifle initiative and invention. It would undermine the development of leadership. It would cramp and cripple the mental and spiritual energies of our people. It would extinguish equality and opportunity. It would dry up the spirit of liberty and progress." - Herbert Hoover, fully Herbert Clark Hoover

"You cannot extend the mastery of the government over the daily working life of a people without at the same time making it the master of the people’s souls and thoughts. Every expansion of government in business means that government in order to protect itself from the political consequences of its errors and wrongs is driven irresistibly without peace to greater and greater control of the nation’s press and platform. Free speech does not live many hours after free industry and free commerce die." - Herbert Hoover, fully Herbert Clark Hoover

"I do not believe you can to today's job with yesterday's methods and be in business tomorrow." - Nelson Jackson, fully Horatio Nelson Jackson

"The God whom science recognizes must be a God of universal laws exclusively, a God who does a wholesale, not a retail business. He cannot accommodate his processes to the convenience of individuals." - William James

"We and God have business with each other and in that business our highest destiny is fulfilled." - William James

"The business of life is to go forward; he who sees evil in prospect meets it in his way, and he who catches it by retrospection turns back to find it. That which is feared may sometimes be avoided, but that which is regretted to-day may be regretted again to-morrow." -

"The business of life, summons us away from useless grief, and calls us to the exercise of those virtues of which we are lamenting our deprivation." -

"To cultivate kindness is a valuable part of the business in life." -

"The function and responsibility of the President is to set before the American people the unfinished business, the things we must do if we are going to succeed as a nation." - John F. Kennedy, fully John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy

"In the business of life, Man is the only product. And there is only one direction in which man can possibly develop if he is to make a better living or yield a bigger dividend to himself, to his race, to nature or to God. He must grow in knowledge, wisdom, kindliness and understanding." - V. C. Kitchen, fully Victor C. Kitchen

"My friend, there will come one day to you a Messenger, whom you cannot treat with contempt. He will say, “Come with me;” and all your pleas of business cares and earthly loves will be of no avail. When his cold hand touches yours, the key of the counting-room will drop forever, and he will lead you away from all your investments, your speculations, your bank-notes and real estate, and with him you will pass into eternity, up to the bar of God. You will not be too busy to die." - Abbott Elliot Kittredge

"Good humor is a tonic for mind and body. It is the best antidote for anxiety and depression. It is a business asset. It attracts and keeps friends. It lightens human burdens. It is the direct route to serenity and contentment." -

"The business of a university is... teaching the student how facts are converted into the truth." -

"You can't run a government solely on a business basis." - Herbert H. Lehman

"Truth, whether in or out of fashion, is the measure of knowledge, and the business of the understanding; whatever is besides that, however authorized by consent, or recommended by rarity, is nothing but ignorance, or something worse." - John Locke

"It is one of my sources of happiness never to desire a knowledge of other people's business." - Dolley Madison, fully Dolley Payne Todd Madison

"Proverbs are in the world of thought what gold coin is in the world of business - great value in small compass, and equally current among all people. Sometimes the proverb may be false, the coin counterfeit, but in both cases the false proves the value of the true." - Daniel March

"The search for causes is indeed the business of philosophers." - Jacques Maritain

"Nothing inspires confidence in a business man sooner than punctuality, nor is there any habit which sooner saps his reputation than that of being always behind time." - William Matthews

"I look upon enthusiasm, in all other points but that of religion, to be a very necessary turn of mind; as indeed it is a vein which nature seems to have marked with more or less strength, in the tempers of most men. No matter what the object is, whether business, pleasures or the fine arts: whoever pursues them to any purpose must do con amore." -

"Leave a little to nature: she understands her business better than we do." - Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne