Quotes to inspire and reflect

A healthy body is a guest chamber for the soul; a sick body is a prison.

Everybody’s heart is open, you know, when they have recently escaped from severe pain, or are recovering the blessing of health.

The pleasure of life is according to the man that lives it, and not according to the work or place.

Be satisfied with your business, and learn to love what you were bred to.

A nation may lose its liberties in a day and not miss them in a century.

What the banker sighs for, the meanest clown may have—leisure and a quiet mind.

No one’s happiness but my own is in my power to achieve or to destroy.

You never see the stock called Happiness quoted on the exchange.

Nobody can really guarantee the future. The best we can do is size up the chances, calculate the risks involved, estimate our ability to deal with them and then make our plans with confidence.

As people used to be wrong about the motion of the sun, so they are still wrong about the motion of the future. The future stands still, it is we who move in infinite space.

It is a good thing to be rich, it is a good thing to be strong, but it is a better thing to be beloved of many friends.

The sum of behavior is to retain a man’s own dignity, without intruding upon the liberty of others.

What wisdom, what warning can prevail against gladness? There is no law so strong that a little gladness may not transgress.

A happy man or woman is a better thing to find than a five-pound note. He or she is a radiating focus of goodwill; and their entrance into a room is as though another candle had been lighted.

I had rather have a fool to make me merry than experience to make me sad.

I believe in the possibility of happiness, if one cultivates intuition and outlives the grosser passions, including optimism.

False happiness is like false money; it passes for a time as well as the true, and serves some ordinary occasions; but when it is brought to the touch, we find the lightness and alloy, and feel the loss.

There is only one way to achieve happiness on this terrestrial ball, and that is to have either a clear conscience, or none at all.

If one only wished to be happy, this could be easily accomplished; but we wish to be happier than other people, and this is always difficult, for we believe others to be happier than they are.

Unquestionably, it is possible to do without happiness; it is done involuntarily by nineteen-twentieths of mankind.

In this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all, and it often comes with bitter agony. Perfect relief is not possible, except with time. You cannot now believe that you will ever feel better. But this is not true. You are sure to be happy again. Knowing this, truly believing it, will make you less miserable now.

Those who are not looking for happiness are the most likely to find it, because those who are searching forget that the surest way to be happy is to seek happiness for others.

Happiness consists more in small conveniences or pleasures that occur every day, than in great pieces of good fortune that happen but seldom to a man in the course of his life.

Happiness in this world, when it comes, comes incidentally. Make it the object of pursuit, and it leads us a wild-goose chase, and is never attained. Follow some other object, and very possibly we may find that we have caught happiness without dreaming of it.

Profit is a byproduct of work; happiness is its chief product.

Don’t be a cynic, and bewail and bemoan. Omit the negative propositions. Don’t waste yourself in rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good. Set down nothing that will help somebody.

A perverse temper and fretful disposition will make any state of life whatsoever unhappy.

Search for a single, inclusive good is doomed to failure. Such happiness as life is capable of comes from the full participation of all our powers in the endeavor to wrest from each changing situation of experience its own full and unique meaning.

Happy is he who still loves something he loved in the nursery: He has not been broken in two by time; he is not two men, but one, and he has saved not only his soul but his life.

True contentment is a thing as active as agriculture. It is the power of getting out of any situation all that there is in it.

Nothing contributes so much to the prosperity and happiness of a country as high profits.

Managers thinking about accounting issues should never forget one of Abraham Lincoln’s favorite riddles: How many legs does a dog have, if you call a tail a leg? The answer: Four, because calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg.

When speculation has done its worst, two and two still make four.

Business is the salt of life.

My precept to all who build, is, that the owner should be an ornament to the house, and not the house to the owner.

There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem.

In business, the idea of measuring what you are doing, picking the measurements that count like customer satisfaction and performance … you thrive on that.

Bureaucracy is the death of any achievement.

I do not believe a man can ever leave his business. He ought to think of it by day and dream of it by night.

If a business does well, the stock eventually follows.

Business, that’s easily defined—it’s other people’s money.

Your premium brand had better be delivering something special, or it’s not going to get the business.

Business is never so healthy as when, like a chicken, it must do a certain amount of scratching around for what it gets.

I think I have learned, in some degree at least, to disregard the old maxim, “Do not get others to do what you can do yourself.” My motto on the other hand is, “Do not do that which others can do as well.”

What recommends commerce to me is its enterprise and bravery. It does not clasp its hands and pray to Jupiter.

We demand that big business give people a square deal; in return we must insist that when anyone engaged in big business honestly endeavors to do right, he shall himself be given a square deal.

The most sensible people to be met with in society are men of business and of the world, who argue from what they see and know, instead of spinning cobweb distinctions of what things ought to be.

To venture causes anxiety, but not to venture is to lose one’s self … and to venture in the highest sense is precisely to become conscious of one’s self.