Business Quotes

Business is where ambition meets reality. These quotes cover entrepreneurship, leadership, risk, failure, and the daily grind of building something that lasts. Expect hard truths alongside inspiration — the best business advice usually includes both.

“The only thing harder than leaving show business is coming back.”

Dave Chappelle

More Business Quotes

“Even if the chef has a good business head, his focus should be behind kitchen doors. A business partner should take care of everything in front of the kitchen doors.”

Bobby Flay

“Well, there's different shades of Hollywood, sure. I mean, I'm working in this business but I'm not Hollywood.”

Shia LaBeouf

“We are at a crossroads in the music business: with the rise of the internet, the world we live in has changed, and the past is not coming back. But I see the glass as half-full: the internet and social networking are new avenues for the next Bob Dylan to be born on.”

Jon Bon Jovi

“Just because you've made a couple movies, you've done some good movies, you've been nominated for some Academy Awards, whatever, nobody's entitled. It's a business. If they don't see it, I can think they're wrong, but I'm not entitled to a $15 million budget to make a film.”

Edward Norton

“This film business, perhaps more so in America than in Europe, has always been about young sexuality. It's not true of theatre, but in America, film audiences are young. It's not an intellectual cinema in America.”

Jacqueline Bisset

“The worst disease which can afflict business executives in their work is not, as popularly supposed, alcoholism it's egotism.”

Harold S. Geneen

“The main business of religions is to purify, control, and restrain that excessive and exclusive taste for well-being which men acquire in times of equality.”

Alexis de Tocqueville

“Well there's nobody who has a more supportive husband than I do, and he has a business that he runs, and it's his own business, so he has work to do, my kids have school to do, I mean, people have - there are other things in life besides politics.”

Caroline Kennedy

“I do not understand how it is that financial institutions could think that they could take taxpayer money and then turn around and act like it's business as usual. I don't understand how they can't see that the world has changed in a fundamental way, that it is not business as usual when you take taxpayer dollars.”

Elizabeth Warren

“The first mistake in public business is the going into it.”

Benjamin Franklin

“At the end of drama school, I made a contract with myself: I'd try acting for five years. I was 26. I had already spent eight years working in restaurants and gas stations. So I had seen enough small businesses to understand that that's what acting is: a small business.”

Hugh Jackman

“The best measure of a man's honesty isn't his income tax return. It's the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.”

Arthur C. Clarke

“You do have to do business with and to try to influence people you don't agree with, or find disagreeable, so it's important to stress that balance.”

William Hague

“There is a fundamental shift that social media necessitates in business today - the need to transition from 'Me First' to 'We First' thinking.”

Simon Mainwaring

“The more you are in this business, the more humbled by it you become.”

Meryl Streep

Other Categories

View all →