57 Inspiring Business Quotes

In the ever-evolving world of business, motivation and inspiration are crucial to overcoming challenges and achieving success. Whether you're an entrepreneur starting a new venture, a seasoned professional climbing the corporate ladder, or someone simply looking to infuse more positivity into your work life, a powerful quote can provide that much-needed boost. We've meticulously gathered a collection of the top 57 inspiring business quotes from renowned leaders, thinkers, and innovators. These words of wisdom are sure to ignite your passion, fuel your drive, and guide you toward your goals. Dive in and let these quotes spark the motivation you need to excel in your business endeavors.

1. “We have not noticed how fast the rest has risen. Most of the industrialized world--and a good part of the nonindustrialized world as well--has better cell phone service than the United States. Broadband is faster and cheaper across the industrial world, from Canada to France to Japan, and the United States now stands sixteenth in the world in broadband penetration per capita. Americans are constantly told by their politicians that the only thing we have to learn from other countries' health care systems is to be thankful for ours. Most Americans ignore the fact that a third of the country's public schools are totally dysfunctional (because their children go to the other two-thirds). The American litigation system is now routinely referred to as a huge cost to doing business, but no one dares propose any reform of it. Our mortgage deduction for housing costs a staggering $80 billion a year, and we are told it is crucial to support home ownership, except that Margaret Thatcher eliminated it in Britain, and yet that country has the same rate of home ownership as the United States. We rarely look around and notice other options and alternatives, convinced that "we're number one.” - Fareed Zakaria

2. “An entrepreneur without funding is a musician without an instrument.” - Robert A. Rice Jr.

3. “A business absolutely devoted to service will have only one worry about profits. They will be embarrassingly large.” - Henry Ford

4. “Buffett's uncommon urge to chronicle made him a unique character in American life, not only a great capitalist but the Great Explainer of American capitalism. He taught a generation how to think about business, and he showed that securities were not just tokens like the Monopoly flatiron, and that investing need not be a game of chance. It was also a logical, commonsensical enterprise, like the tangible businesses beneath. He stripped Wall Street of its mystery and rejoined it to Main Street -- a mythical or disappearing place, perhaps, but one that is comprehensible to the ordinary American.” - Roger Lowenstein

5. “That's the positive aspect of trade I suppose. The world gets stirred up together. That's about as much as I have to say for it.” - Isabel Hoving

6. “...[D]ivision of labor, in my mind, is one of the dangers of work-based technology. Modern IT infrastructure allows us to break projects into very small, discrete parts and assign each person to do only one of the many parts. In so doing, companies run the risk of taking away employees' sense of the big picture, purpose, and sense of completion.” - Dan Ariely

7. “They have to say SOMETHING. Maria Bartiromo can't exactly look into the camera and say that the Dow is down half a percent today because of random Brownian motion.” - Phil Rosenzweig

8. “Make your customers comfortable and they will give you their lives.” - Paul Orfalea

9. “Some PR is about getting information about a great product or thingy out to the people who would enjoy it, while other PR is about creating a web of lies that conceals the fact that your company harnesses the energy produced by rape and uses it to make a chemical that kills forests for fun. Either way, you're going to need it.” - Eugene Mirman

10. “When [what you are deeply passionate about, what you can be best in the world at and what drives your economic engine] come together, not only does your work move toward greatness, but so does your life. For, in the end, it is impossible to have a great life unless it is a meaningful life. And it is very difficult to have a meaningful life without meaningful work. Perhaps, then, you might gain that rare tranquility that comes from knowing that you’ve had a hand in creating something of intrinsic excellence that makes a contribution. Indeed, you might even gain that deepest of all satisfactions: knowing that your short time here on this earth has been well spent, and that it mattered.” - Jim Collins

11. “If you take the approach of “earning” your customers’ business every day and treating them well, they’re less likely to try someone else.” - Marilyn Suttle

12. “People who work in an environment where doing their best is recognized have a better chance of feeling good about their work.” - Marilyn Suttle

13. “Education is what you get from reading the small print; experience iswhat you get from not reading it.” - Common Sense

14. “Delegating your accountabilities is abdication” - Michael E. Gerber

15. “She felt the cold blast from the sterile air conditioning on her bare arms and thighs, as she ambled down the center of the shopping complex's ground floor.The scene was a swirl of candy bright lights--the Victoria's Secret fuchsia signboard, signboards which lured one to purchase "confidence," or "sexual appeal," or whatever it was that was being advertised--the fluorescent lights in each store, contrasting with the shiny, black-tiled walls and eye-catching speckled marble tiles on the ground.One could lick the floor--the tiles were spotless, clean like the fake air she was breathing in, like the atoms and cells in her that were decaying in stale neglect.” - Jess C. Scott

16. “Smartass Disciple: Master, you keep preaching the truth. They don't listen.Master of Stupidity: Oh that's not bad. That attitude keeps us in the business.” - Toba Beta

17. “The idea of finding value in what people are willing to pay to get rid of it one of the fundamental backbones of ecocapitalism, as I think of it now.” - Tom Szaky

18. “In looking at waste as an entirely modern, man-made idea, I stopped viewing garbage as garbage and instead slowly started to see it as a commodity.” - Tom Szaky

19. “After the monkeys came down from the trees and learned to hurl sharp objects, they had had to move into caves for protection--not only from the big predatory cats but, as they began to lose their monkey fur, from the elements. Eventually, they started transposing their hunting fantasies onto cave walls in the form of pictures, first as an attempt at practical magic and later for the strange, unexpected pleasure they discovered in artistic creation. Time passed. Art came off the walls and turned into ritual. Ritual became religion. Religion spawned science. Science led to big business. And big business, if it continues on its present mindless, voracious trajectory, could land those of us lucky enough to survive its ultimate legacy back into caves again.” - Tom Robbins

20. “Steve Jobs gave a small private presentation about the iTunes Music Store to some independent record label people. My favorite line of the day was when people kept raising their hand saying, "Does it do [x]?", "Do you plan to add [y]?". Finally Jobs said, "Wait wait — put your hands down. Listen: I know you have a thousand ideas for all the cool features iTunes could have. So do we. But we don't want a thousand features. That would be ugly. Innovation is not about saying yes to everything. It's about saying NO to all but the most crucial features.” - Derek Sivers

21. “No secrecy, no business.” - Toba Beta

22. “Both terrorism and insurance sell fear -- and business is business” - Liam McCurry

23. “What's Management up to?" I whispered to Bennett."My guess is a new acronym," he whispered. "Departmental Unification Management Business." He wrote down the ltters on his legal pad. "D.U.M.B.” - Connie Willis

24. “Every telecomm company is as big a corporate welfare bum as you could ask for. Try to imagine what it would cost at market rates to go around to every house in every town in every country and pay for the right to block traffic and dig up roads and erect poles and string wires and pierce every home with cabling. The regulatory fiat that allows these companies to get their networks up and running is worth hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of dollars.If phone companies want to operate in the “free market,” then let them: the FCC could give them 60 days to get all their rotten copper out of our dirt, or we’ll buy it from them at the going scrappage rates. Then, let’s hold an auction for the right to be the next big telecomm company, on one condition: in exchange for using the public’s rights-of-way, you have to agree to connect us to the people we want to talk to, and vice-versa, as quickly and efficiently as you can.” - Cory Doctorow

25. “A beverage of leisure is a serious business,” Shane Bowermaster was known to declare. “There can be no product of pleasure without the inverse on the end of the producer.” - Jeff Phillips

26. “To befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business & corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day.” - Theodore Roosevelt

27. “...As marriage was woman's business, unmarried women, though doubtless unfortunate, must simply be considered as business failures: harsh, doubtless, but in tune with the sink-or-swim capitalist times.” - Ruth Brandon

28. “What you of the CHOAM directorate seem unable to understand is that you seldom find real loyalties in commerce ... Men must want to do things of their own innermost drives. People, not commercial organisations or chains of command, are what make great civilizations work, every civilization depends upon the quality of the individuals it produces. If you overorganize humans, over-legalize them, suppress their urge to greatness — they cannot work and their civilization collapses.” - Frank Herbert

29. “...After all, the chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world. I am strongly of the opinion that the great majority of people will always find these are the moving impulses of our life. But it is only those who do not understand our people, who believe that our national life is entirely absorbed by material motives. We make no concealment of the fact that we want wealth, but there are many other things that we want much more. We want peace and honor, and that charity which is so strong an element of all civilization. The chief ideal of the American people is idealism.” - Calvin Coolidge

30. “The Business of Our Firm is Business"-Donald W. Hudspeth from:"The Business of America is Business"-Calvin Coolidge” - Calvin Coolidge

31. “We cannot prevail by our own might or strength, we need to plug on to the source of our strength so that we will remain resourceful always.” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu

32. “You may not attain the highest height with one leap but my dear; you will reach your destination.” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu

33. “The presence of the Lord destroys a life of struggle. You will struggle until you encounter His presence.” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu

34. “Your words are powerful so what you say goes a long way to either establish or destroy you; this is why you should say things that God has said concerning you, not things that situations or circumstances say.” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu

35. “The choice is yours. Don't let your pronouncements destroy your destiny rather let them build your future up!” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu

36. “You are not permitted to live and die as a non-entity because you have encountered the greatness that is associated with Christ.” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu

37. “Don't call yourself discouraged anymore;it's no longer your name.” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu

38. “Be a King. Dare to be Different, dare to manifest your greatness.” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu

39. “Between the Great Depression and the 1970s, private business was viewed with suspicion even in most capitalist economies.Businesses were, so the story goes, seen as anti-social agents whose profit-seeking needed to be restrained for other, supposedly loftier, goals, such as justice, social harmony, protection of the weak and even national glory.” - Ha-Joon Chang

40. “Wer mit den Haien schwimmt, der darf nicht bluten. Aber, mein Freund, Du blutest gerade. Und zwar heftig” - David Gray

41. “I don,t just want success for my self ,I want my success to benefit others .Osman Gulum” - Osman Gulum

42. “Until you understand your customers - deeply and genuinely - you cannot hope to serve them” - Rasheed Ogunlaru

43. “Like any other tool for facilitating the completion of a questionable task, rewards offer a "how" answer to what is really a "why" question.” - Alfie Kohn

44. “Business after all is a form of warfare; you bring all your available weapons to bear. If you don't you're a fool. ("Jane Brown's Body")” - Cornell Woolrich

45. “Invest in the future because that is where you are going to spend the rest of your life.” - Habeeb Akande

46. “Marketing is not the art of finding clever ways to dispose of what you make. It is the art of creating genuine customer value.” - Philip Kotler

47. “When you’re in another country, remember to do as the locals do, since it is your ways that may seem strange of offensive to them.” - Tracey Wilen

48. “Attack him where he is unprepared, appear where you are not expected.” - Sun Tzu

49. “do many calculations lead to victory, and few calculations to defeat” - Sun Tzu

50. “The good fighters of old first put themselves beyond the possibility of defeat, and then waited for an opportunity of defeating the enemy.” - Sun Tzu

51. “Aprendre dels errors està sobrevalorat” - Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson

52. “There is a ladder to Success! Choose to climb it.” - Agu Jaachynma N E

53. “Always contend for the good!” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu

54. “Light is life and always wins.” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu

55. “You are created with a mandate! You have all you need to fulfill it.” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu

56. “The whole secret lies in confusing the enemy, so that he cannot fathom our real intent.” - Sun Tzu

57. “If he sends reinforcements everywhere, he will everywhere be weak.” - Sun Tzu