The growth of a large business is merely a survival of the fittest... The American beauty rose can be produced in the splendour and fragance which bring cheer to its beholder only by sacrificing the early buds which grow up around it. (John D.Rockefeller)
Business first; pleasure afterwards. (William Makepeace Thackeray, The Rose and the Ring)
The chief business of the American people is business. (Calvin Coolidge)
An annuity is a very serious business (Jane Austen)
In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bumbs living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the succesful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent business man. (Sinclair Lewis)
Wist ye not that I must be about my Father's business? (St Luke ch.2, v.49)
To business that we love we rise betime,
And go to 't with delight.
(Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra)
Go to your business, I say, pleasure, whilst I go to my pleasure, business. (William Wycherley, The Country Wife)
Woman, a pleasing but a short-lived flower,
Too soft for business and too weak for power:
A wife in bondage, or neglected maid:
Despised, if ugly; if she's fair, betrayed.
(Mary Leapor, An Essay on Woman)
White shall not neutralize the black, nor good
Compensate bad in man, absolve him so:
Life's business being just the terrible choice.
(Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book)
Business carried on as usual during alterations on the map of Europe. (Winston Churchill, 1914)
For when his day's work is done his business more properly begins.
For he keeps the Lord's watch in the night against the adversary.
For he counteracts the powers of darkness by his electrical skin and glaring eyes.
For he counteracts the Devil, who is death, by brisking about the life.
(Christopher Smart, Jubilate Agno)
NINOTCHKA: Why should you carry other people's bags?
PORTER: Well,that's my business, Madame.
NINOTCHKA: That's no business. Thta's social injustice.
PORTER: That depends on the tip.
(Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder and Walter Reisch, film 1939)
Quotations: Far from business:
Happy the man who, far away from business, like the race of men of old, tills his ancestral fields with his own oxen, unbound by any interest to pay. (Oracio, Quintus Horatius Flaccus)
How to succeed in business without really trying. (Title of book, 1952)
Business was his aversion; pleasure was his business. (Maria Edgeworth, The Contrast)
All animals, except man, know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it. (Samuel Butler)
Who first invented work -and tied the free
And holy-day rejoicing spirit down
To the ever-haunting importunity
Of business?
(Charles Lamb, 1822)
