Of my mental cycles, I devote maybe ten percent to business thinking. Business isn’t that complicated. I wouldn’t want to put it on my business card.

No enterprise is more likely to succeed than one concealed from the enemy until it is ripe for execution.

I don’t argue when people say that my message is simple, but I believe Jesus‘ message was simple. Jesus didn’t go around condemning people.

Happy the man whose wish and care a few paternal acres bound, content to breathe his native air in his own ground.

Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason why so few engage in it.

By reading, you learn through others‘ experiences, generally, a better way to do business, especially in our line of work where the consequences of incompetence are so final for young men.

If investments in banks fall, it is a tragedy, and people say, ‚What are we going to do?‘ but if people die of hunger, have nothing to eat or suffer from poor health, that’s nothing.

A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man’s life as in a book. Haste makes waste, no less in life than in housekeeping. Keep the time, observe the hours of the universe, not of the cars.

Politics is just a function of business now, just a tributary of the great entrepreneurial capitalist system.

The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.

We should never let material things get ahead of God or become so important in our lives that we can’t walk away from them if He tells us to. Anything you own that has a hold on you is a problem.

Landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed.

Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.

I still live, I still think: I still have to live, for I still have to think.

To be safe at the expense of the liberty of other people is a difficult equation.

The perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them.

Republicans are for both the man and the dollar, but in case of conflict the man before the dollar.

Percentage margins don’t matter. What matters always is dollar margins: the actual dollar amount. Companies are valued not on their percentage margins, but on how many dollars they actually make, and a multiple of that.

There are goods so opposed that we cannot seize both, but, by too much prudence, may pass between them at too great a distance to reach either.

A friendship founded on business is better than a business founded on friendship.

With all the… success that I’ve been lucky enough to get? That doesn’t happen unless the home life is solid.

For me the greatest source of income is still movies. Nothing – stocks, financial speculation, real estate speculation or businesses – makes more money for me than making movies.

The bottom line is, when people are crystal clear about the most important priorities of the organization and team they work with and prioritized their work around those top priorities, not only are they many times more productive, they discover they have the time they need to have a whole life.

Elegance is achieved when all that is superfluous has been discarded and the human being discovers simplicity and concentration: the simpler and more sober the posture, the more beautiful it will be.

There are things around, and I know where they can be got quite easily, but I quite like waking up to the sunshine.

Work is the meat of life, pleasure the dessert.

Me is a common sense man. That mean when me explain things, me explain it in a very simple way; that mean if I explain it to a baby, the baby will understand too, you know.

Real art has been… what’s the word? Kidnapped? No, that’s not it. But, OK, kidnapped by business.

My problem was my inability to spend much time at home. I thought my family was secure, so I went running around everyplace else. I guess I had more of an effect on other people’s kids than I did my own.

Let me remind you that credit is the lifeblood of business, the lifeblood of prices and jobs.

When you’re young, you look at television and think, there’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want.

It is the superfluous things for which men sweat, – superfluous things that wear our togas theadbare, that force us to grow old in camp, that dash us upon foreign shores.

A man should never neglect his family for business.

‚Tis healthy to be sick sometimes.

Riches are a good hand maiden, but a poor mistress.

There is moderation even in excess.

Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise.

Why a four-year-old child could understand this report. Run out and find me a four-year-old child. I can’t make head nor tail out of it.

I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.

Part of the reason there’s an injunction to the truth, for example, is that if you’re in a circumstance of extreme uncertainty, your best weapon, let’s say, or your best tool or your best defense is the truth, because it keeps things simpler.

I don’t believe you could be a 39-year-old quarterback in the NFL and eat cheeseburgers every day. I want to be able to do what I love to do for a long time.

Everything isn’t political.

Part of the secret of a success in life is to eat what you like and let the food fight it out inside.

The truth is rarely pure and never simple.

Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends… Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.

My model for business is The Beatles: They were four guys that kept each others‘ negative tendencies in check; they balanced each other. And the total was greater than the sum of the parts.

The mere thought hadn’t even begun to speculate about the merest possibility of crossing my mind.

That’s been one of my mantras – focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.

He has the most who is most content with the least.

I don’t think it’s possible to have a sense of tragedy without having a sense of humor.

When you play, play hard; when you work, don’t play at all.

Modern poets talk against business, poor things, but all of us write for money. Beginners are subjected to trial by market.

Thou shouldst eat to live; not live to eat.

Over a 10-year period, 99 out of 100 new entrepreneurs will fail. Only one will be left standing as others get pushed out of the market or burn out from working so hard. It’s really sad.

The idea that there is one kind of African is, of course, ridiculous. Sometimes African entrepreneurs want to kill you because you are saying public health is the priority, not roads. Of course they are right to press for that issue, but so are we right, I believe, to argue, for example, that millions of children could and should be vaccinated.

The answer to many of the domestic problems we face is not higher taxes and more spending. It is less waste, more results and greater freedom for the individual American to earn a rightful place in his own community – and for States and localities to address their own needs in their own ways, in the light of their own priorities.

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

To keep the business going, you gotta keep it boomin‘.

Simplify, simplify.

Strength and compassion are not mutually exclusive.

The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.