Quotations
Sentences that have stuck over years of consulting work — on friendship, truth, work and composure.
On the paths of friendship, no grass should be allowed to grow.
Marie-Thérése Geoffrin
The ball is made of leather, leather comes from cows, cows eat grass — and that is where the ball belongs.
Alfredo di Stéfano, spanische Fußballlegende
The people misunderstand most things; but they feel most things rightly.
Kurt Tucholsky
The ability to fill one’s leisure well is the last stage of personal culture.
Bertrand Russell
None of us is in the world for himself alone; he is there for everyone else as well.
Gregor von Nazianz
Man is born to live, not to prepare for life.
Bernhard von Clairvaux
The truth is rarely one way or the other. Most of the time it is both.
Geraldine Chaplin
The better is the enemy of the good.
Voltaire
Nature is truly wise: man has two ears and only one tongue. He ought to listen twice as much as he speaks.
Epiktet
One stays young as long as one can still learn, take on new habits and bear contradiction.
Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
Clarity of one’s inner life is a person’s highest good.
Adalbert Stifter
When God quenches a person’s thirst, he still leaves them the longing. Therein lies the greatest grace he can grant.
Teresa von Ávila
No one is so rich that they do not need a neighbour.
From Hungary
Nobody knows as much bad about us as we do ourselves — and yet nobody thinks as well of us as we do.
Franz von Schönthan
It is not hard to do something good, but it is hard to do it a whole life long.
Chinese proverb
Intellect and genius call forth respect and esteem; wit and humour awaken love and affection.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
The best friendship is between two people who expect a great deal of each other and never call it in.
From India
There are more than thirty million laws in the world to enforce the Ten Commandments.
Albert Schweitzer
Man is evidently made to think — that is his dignity and his greatness; but his duty is to think rightly.
Blaise Pascal
It is dangerous to deceive others, for it ends with deceiving oneself.
Eleonara Duse
Composure is the art of gaining, in the present situation, the distance that otherwise only time provides.
Unknown
Never follow the crowd merely because you are afraid of being different.
Margaret Thatcher
People go to seed when they never put on their Sunday best.
Thomas Carlyle
Coincidence is God’s synonym when he prefers not to sign his own name.
Anatole France
The annoying thing about annoyance is that it harms you without benefiting anyone else.
Kurt Tucholsky
Growing old happens by itself. Growing up takes rather more effort.
Alte Volksweisheit
To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognised need of the human soul.
Simone Weil
The best mirror is the eye of a friend.
Gaelic wisdom
A people’s greatest treasure is its children — they hold the promise of the future. Unlocking their secret and fostering them makes those already grown richer too.
P. Heribert Heuel SAC
You cannot fight when your trousers are fuller than your heart.
Carl von Ossietzky
The years teach much which the days never know.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
People are not always what they seem, but seldom anything better.
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
It is better for us that our life speaks, not our words.
Mahatma Gandhi
Between arrogance and humility stands something to which life belongs, and that is quite simply courage.
Theodor Fontane
Had a committee been appointed to create the world, it would not be finished yet.
George Bernard Shaw
No one should have cause to say that you speak differently from how you think.
Karl Borromäus
The art of living consists more in wrestling than in dancing.
Marc Aurel
Take your time; a field that has been allowed to rest yields a splendid harvest.
Ovid
You can change the world or yourself. The second is harder.
Mark Twain
Beautiful flowers grow slowly; only the weeds are in a hurry.
William Shakespeare
Never put off a good deed because it seems insignificant, thinking you will do greater ones at a more suitable time.
Ignatius von Loyola
In a river, the water you touch is the last of what has passed and the first of what is coming. So it is with the present.
Leonardo da Vinci
God always helps. Only he often arrives a quarter of an hour late, so that we can show how far our faith reaches.
Abbé Pierre
People are there to help one another, and when you need someone’s help you must ask for it. That is the way of the world, and it is a long way from begging.
Jeremias Gotthelf
Listen inwardly every day, so that you learn what your inner voice wants to tell you.
Patrice Jeancourt
Nothing is more humiliating than to see fools succeed in enterprises at which we have failed.
Gustave Flaubert
Dealing with a person who already knows the world does much to help us know ourselves.
Teresa von Ávila
An optimist is someone who orders a dozen oysters hoping to pay for them with the pearl he finds.
Theodor Fontane
Delusions of grandeur are not thinking yourself more than you are, but thinking yourself exactly what you are.
Karl Kraus
You do not stumble over your mistakes. You always stumble over the enemies who exploit them.
Kurt Tucholsky
It is true that money does not make you happy. What is meant, though, is other people’s money.
George Bernard Shaw
Take the way across the brooks and do not plunge straight into the sea. One must reach the difficult by way of the easy.
Thomas von Aquin, 1225-1274)
It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.
Seneca
There are moments in which one must not only see, but also turn a blind eye.
Benjamin Franklin
Never try to make anyone into what you are yourself. You know — and God knows too — that one of your sort is enough.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We call absurd what is impossible and happens anyway; what is possible but does not happen, we call typical.
Gabriel Laub
A falling tree makes more noise than a growing forest.
From Tibet
Use your talents. The woods would be very silent if only the most gifted birds sang.
Henry van Dyke
Great victories are won by courage, greater ones by love, and the greatest by patience.
Peter Rosegger
You do not affect others with words. You do it with your character.
Romain Rolland
Whoever starts much may fail. Whoever starts nothing has already failed.
Unknown
It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.
John Maynard Keynes
The secret of being able lies in being willing.
Giuseppe Mazzini
That people will be full of greed, fear or folly is predictable. The sequence is not.
Warren Buffett (*1930)
Good customers are an asset which, well treated and well served, secures the business a handsome income for life.
Philip Kotler (*1931)
Small companies, right down to the sole trader, can beat large bureaucratic groups in ten cases out of ten.
John Nasbitt (*1929)
Is your company so small that you have to do everything yourself? Wait until it is big enough that you can no longer do so. That is worse still.
Michael Bloomberg (*1942)
Build the company around the people; you have to build it, not buy it — and then be the best.
Richard Branson (*1950)
Be sure of one thing: when a CEO is enthusiastic about a particularly foolish acquisition, both his internal staff and his outside advisers will produce heaven knows what projections to justify his position. Only in fairy tales is the emperor told that he is naked.
Warren Buffett (*1930)
If you take care of your customers and take care of the people who take care of your customers, you ought to succeed.
Charles Dunstone (*1964)
We should never let ourselves be pressed by an either-or. Often there is a possibility better than both alternatives.
Mary Parker Follett (1868-1933)
A little blindness is necessary when you take on a risk.
Bill Gates (*1955)
Nothing astonishes people more than reason and honest treatment.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82)
Business profit comes from loyal customers — customers who praise your product and your service and bring their friends along.
W. Edwards Deming (1900-93)
You may scold a carpenter who has made you a bad table, even though you cannot make a table yourself. It is not your trade to make tables.
Samuel Johnson (1709-84)
Anyone afraid of losing money can never become an entrepreneur. It would be like a pilot afraid of bad weather.
Peter de Savary (*1944)
In business, the reputation of standing absolutely by the letter and the spirit of an agreement is the most precious asset there is — even though it appears on no balance sheet.
Oliver Littleton, First Viscount Chandos (1893-1972)
I believe you have to understand the economics of a business before you adopt a strategy, and you have to understand the strategy before you adopt a structure. Get these things in the wrong order and you will probably fail.
Michael Dell (*1965)