Business Books Quotes

The illusion that one has understood the past feeds the further illusion that one can predict and control the future. These illusions are comforting. They reduce the anxiety that we would experience if we allowed ourselves to fully acknowledge the uncertainties of existence. We all have a need for the reassuring message that actions have appropriate consequences, and that success will reward wisdom and courage. Many business books are tailor-made to satisfy this need. ~ Daniel Kahneman

Writers Are Insane. For months we are lone wolves locked in our caves. Then overnight we become publicity hounds. It's a schizophrenic business. ~ Robert Mykle

To retire by the age of 35 was my goal. I wasn't sure how I was going to get there though. I knew I would end up owning my own business someday, so I figured my challenge was to learn as much as anyone about all businesses. I believed that every job I took was really me getting paid to learn about a new industry. I spent as much time as I could, learning and reading everything about business I could get my hands on. I used to go into the library for hours and hours reading business books and magazines. ~ Mark Cuban

I am not in the business of suppressing books. ~ Salman Rushdie

Read any of the top-selling business books, all of them talk about moving away from a top down manner of leading to a more inclusive one. It's not happening over night, but if you read the winds of change in most of the democracies in the world we are moving toward shared levels of power. ~ Elizabeth Lesser

Your seeds of success won't grow unless you plant them. Intentions won't produce the results you want. ~ Clay Clark

K.R. understands the distinction between pressure and stress. He cites the famous image of William Tell shooting an apple off his son's head: "In this scenario, William Tell feels pressure. His son feels stress." K.R> keeps the pressure on his team to act, but doesn't create stress by holding them accountable for outcomes beyond their control. ~ Liz Weiseman

At the end of the day, businesses should exist to provide profits for their team to share as a result of solving problems for their customers. ~ Clay Clark

No matter how good it is, your book will not sell itself. ~ Elinor Florence

Thomas Friedman's 'The World is Flat' sold more copies in India than in the U.K. The market for go-getting business books or wonkish tomes by corporate moguls posing as philosopher kings has grown dramatically in modernising China and India. ~ Pankaj Mishra

Some people read business books looking for confirmation. I read them in search of disquiet. Confirmation is cheap, easy and ineffective. Restlessness and the scientific method, on the other hand, create a culture of testing and inquiry that can't help but push you forward. ~ Seth Godin

I think when companies are struggling, they don't want to talk to the press. The guys who write business books aren't interested in it because nobody wants to learn what it's like to be a mess, you want to learn how to be successful. That's slanted the whole thing quite a bit. ~ Ben Horowitz

I'm not big on reading business books. I get copies of all of them, because people want me to put a comment on the jacket. Every once in a while, I'll get interested and read one all the way through. ~ James Goodnight

Don't go on tours with people who have never been there. ~ Clay Clark

Writing blurbs for books means you have to read the book, and it cuts into the business of bookselling. So every time I get a blurb from a bookseller, I try to write a thank you note. ~ Gabrielle Zevin

I like to read first thing in the morning. I'm addicted to the Kindle. I read a lot of business books, because I feel like I should figure out how to be a real businessman before someone figures out that I'm not one. I really enjoy reading classics as well, which I try to work in once every two months. ~ Matt Mullenweg

The genre of narrative business books that I love so much - the ones that have a you-are-there quality - was invented, or so it is said, in 1982 by David McClintick, who wrote 'Indecent Exposure,' a rollicking good read about a Hollywood scandal and the ultimate boardroom power struggle at Columbia Pictures. ~ Andrew Ross Sorkin

The apartment was tiny, but neat: the bed was made; a few books (business books and a self-help book, all in English and all from the library) were stacked on a nightstand. ~ Patrick Hoffman

I dislike reading business books, although I skim a lot of them. ~ Brad Feld

Day baseball is now dead for all practical purposes. Sooner or later, the game will be played in its entirety at night, and as I've said before, then baseball will be squarely in the amusement, the entertainment business along with wrestling, midget auto racing and the trotting tracks. ~ Larry MacPhail

In books we never find anything but ourselves. Strangely enough, that always gives us great pleasure, and we say the author is a genius. ~ Thomas Mann

Unlike John Lasseter's bosses at Disney, Bezos was open to the entrepreneurial contributions of Amazon's individual employees - even when those ideas were outside what Wall Street (and even his own board of directors) considered the company's core business. AWS represents precisely the kind of value creation any CEO or shareholder would want from their employees. Want your employees to come up with multibillion-dollar ideas while on the job? You have to attract professionals with the founder mind-set and then harness their entrepreneurial impulses for your company. As Intuit CEO Brad Smith told us, A leader's job is not to put greatness into people, but rather to recognize that it already exists, and to create the environment where that greatness can emerge and grow. ~ Reid Hoffman

Love's only business is to preserve the race, not the individual. ~ Geoffrey Household

Some books we read, tho' few there are that hit the happy point where wisdom joins with wit. ~ Benjamin Franklin

What benefits new books bring us! I would like a basket full of books telling the youth of images which fall from heaven for me every day. This desire is natural. This prodigy is easy. For, up there, in heaven, isn't paradise an immense library?

But it is not sufficient to receive; one must welcome. One must, say the pedagogue and the dietician in the same voice, 'assimilate.' In order to do that, we are advised not to read too fast and to be careful not to swallow too large a bite. We are told to divide each difficulty into as many parts as possible, the better to solve them. Yes, chew well, drink a little at a time, savor poems line by line. All these precepts are well and good. But one precept orders them. One first needs a good desire to eat, drink and read. One must want to read a lot, read more, always read.

Thus, in the morning, before the books piled high on my table, to the god of reading, I say my prayer of the devouring reader: 'Give us this day our daily hunger . . .'" - Gaston Bachelard, "Introduction", The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos, Pages 25-26 ~ Gaston Bachelard

For business and life, if you are not experiencing growth, you're possibly dying. ~ Nkem Paul

One of the reasons I hate Hollywood so much is that they portray the travails of teen life as so innocuous and fun loving, some kind of idyll before the mean business of adulthood. People forget how much it all hurts back then. Someone pinches you and you feel it in your bones. They don't want to face what a bunch of fragile sadists teenagers were. All these folks who acted all shocked and outraged when those kids in Columbine went off - where the hell did they go to high school? ~ Steve Almond

Take off my clothes and there becomes a man. Take off my skin and there becomes my bones. Break all my bones and there becomes my heart. Smash my heart and there becomes my soul. And that you cannot take. And what is my soul? ... It is everything that make a man. It is everything that makes this man. ~ Carew Papritz

I predict that many teams will go out of business and the size of the leagues will be greatly reduced. ~ Will McDonough

When women gain control over spending, less family money is devoted to instant gratification and more for education and starting small businesses. ~ Sheryl WuDunn

It's true that I had a bucolic, truly peaceful childhood, growing up in a house next to our family's orchard. We had a lot of books and art, but no electricity until I was eight years old. Since then, I have seen a lot of inner-city life, though. ~ Virginia Euwer Wolff

This was a land of lost souls. Human beings who had weathered great storms in life, had suffered unspeakable loss, had been put to painful tests of existence, and still remained standing - but just barely. ~ Clare Vanderpool

I don't care about wearing branded clothes or flaunting brands. But I do care about the books that I read and the music that I listen to. ~ Avijeet Das

If kids like a picture book, they're going to read it at least 50 times, and their parents are going to have to read it with them. Read anything that often, and even minor imperfections start to feel like gravel in the bed. ~ Mark Haddon

Whether they stem from business or personal situations, our relationships are what support us, connect us, and allow us to progress in all aspects of our lives. ~ Michelle Tillis Lederman

The business of art is no longer the communication of thoughts or feelings which are to be conceptually ordered, but a direct participation in an experience. The whole tendency of modern communication ... is towards participation in a process, rather than apprehension of concepts. ~ Marshall McLuhan

Hank Nearly was an avid reader. He arrived early in his brown corduroy coat, with a book taken from the library, copied all the pages on the Xerox machine, and sat at his desk reading what looked passebly like the honest pages of business. He's make it through a three-hundred-page novel every two or three days. ~ Joshua Ferris

The function of a great library is to store obscure books. ~ Nicholson Baker

Basically, the UBR is a relic of an earlier vision for UDDI. The original vision for UDDI was as a standard that would help companies conduct business with each other in an automated fashion. The idea was that companies could publish how they wanted to interact, and other companies could find that information and use it to establish a relationship. ~ Michael Bloomberg

Work, the gospel of work, the sanctity of work, laborare est orare - all that tripe and nonsense. 'Work!' he once broke out contemptuously against the reasonable expostulations of Philip Quarles, 'work is no more respectable than alcohol, and it serves exactly the same purpose: it just distracts the mind, makes a man forget himself. Work's simply a drug, that's all. It's humiliating that men shouldn't be able to live without drugs, soberly; it's humiliating that they shouldn't have the courage to see the world and themselves as they really are. They must intoxicate themselves with work. It's stupid. The gospel of work's just a gospel of stupidity and funk. Work may be prayer; but it's also hiding one's head in the sand, it's also making such a din and a dust that a man can't hear himself speak or see his own hand before his face. It's hiding yourself from yourself. No wonder the Samuel Smileses and the big business men are such enthusiasts for work. Work gives them the comforting illusion of existing, even of being important. If they stopped working, they'd realize that they simply weren't there at all, most of them. Just holes in the air, that's all. Holes with perhaps a rather nasty smell in them. Most Smilesian souls must smell rather nasty, I should think. No wonder they daren't stop working. They might find out what they really are, or rather aren't. It's a risk they haven't the courage to take. ~ Aldous Huxley

When a stargirl cries, she sheds not tears but light. ~ Jerry Spinelli

I'm a library user and I just don't hoard books. To me, they're for sharing. ~ Sara Sheridan

There's a reason every book, even one that isn't very serious, is shaped like a suitcase ~ Sergei Dovlatov

Skulls" said Lady Lamorna. "Definitely skulls. Rows and rows of dear little skulls, sewn all along the hem. ~ Vivian French

Eric Schlosser's book on the economy and strategies of the fast-food business should be read by anyone who likes to take their children to fast-food restaurants. I shall certainly never do that again. He employs a long, cold burn, a quiet and impassioned accumulation of detail, with calm, wit and clarity. ( ... ) Fast Food Nation is witness to the rigour and seriousness of the best American journalism, readable, reliable and extremely carefully done. ~ Adam Nicolson

We are cursed with the blessing of consciousness and choice, a two-edged sword that both divides us and can help us become whole. But choosing wholeness, which sounds like a good thing, turns out to be risky business, making us vulnerable in ways we would prefer to avoid. ~ Parker J. Palmer

Power," Nita heard her father say behind her. "Creation. Forces from before time. This is
this business is for saints, not children!"
Even saints have to start somewhere," Carl said softly. "And it's always been the children who have saved the universe from the previous generation and remade the universe in their own image. ~ Diane Duane

I was brought up in a home where I saw my parents read and I was taken to bookshops and libraries, so I grew up feeling very comfortable around books. Also, Ireland is a country which has honoured its writers and poets, so when someone says they wanted to be a writer, its not mocked or looked down upon. ~ Michael Scott

There isn't one thing the federal government does that anybody in Big Business would emulate, at least not in the profit sector. ~ Rush Limbaugh

Conservative, (New York, Beaufort Books, ~ John Philip Sousa IV

Awareness is bad for the meat business. Conscience is bad for the meat business. Sensitivity to life is bad for the meat business. DENIAL, however, the meat business finds indispensable. ~ John Robbins

This is what books only aimed to do and never could. Give you the glint of someone else's sunrise, what living is really like, you get old and it hurts to bend your elbow; your friends start to die, you can't get fresh fruit in the shops. ~ Geoff Ryman