#pro

Colors shone with exceptional clarity in the rain. The ground was a deep black, the pine branches a brilliant green, the people wrapped in yellow looking like special spirits that were allowed to wander over the earth on rainy mornings only. ↗

— Haruki Murakami

#clarity #colours #prose #rain #spirit

Once you become aware that the main business that you are here for is to know God, most of life's problems fall into place of their own accord. ↗

— J.I. Packer

#problems #business

When you depersonalize abrasive behavior and see it as a call for help you become a catalyst for the best kind of change. ↗

— Marilyn Suttle

#customer-service #inspiration #relationships #self-improvement #business

After the monkeys came down from the trees and learned to hurl sharp objects, they had had to move into caves for protection--not only from the big predatory cats but, as they began to lose their monkey fur, from the elements. Eventually, they started transposing their hunting fantasies onto cave walls in the form of pictures, first as an attempt at practical magic and later for the strange, unexpected pleasure they discovered in artistic creation. Time passed. Art came off the walls and turned into ritual. Ritual became religion. Religion spawned science. Science led to big business. And big business, if it continues on its present mindless, voracious trajectory, could land those of us lucky enough to survive its ultimate legacy back into caves again. ↗

— Tom Robbins

#business #caves #progress #religion #science

You know that sickening feeling of inadequacy and over-exposure you feel when you look upon your own empurpled prose? Relax into the awareness that this ghastly sensation will never, ever leave you, no matter how successful and publicly lauded you become. It is intrinsic to the real business of writing and should be cherished. ↗

— Will Self

#exposure #inadequacy #prose #self-criticism #writing

My case is urgent, and I do not see how I am to be delivered; but this is no business of mine. He who makes the promise will find ways and means of keeping it. It is mine to obey His commands; it is not mine to direct His counsels. ↗

— C.H. Spurgeon

#god #obedience #promises #business

If we only have great companies, we will merely have a prosperous society, not a great one. Economic growth and power are the means, not the definition, of a great nation. ↗

— Jim Collins

#non-profit #society #business

He had been taught as a child that Urras was a festering mass of inequity, iniquity, and waste. But all the people he met, and all the people he saw, in the smallest country village, were well dressed, well fed, and contrary to his expectations, industrious. They did not stand about sullenly waiting to be ordered to do things. Just like Anaresti, they were simply busy getting things done. It puzzled him. He had assumed that if you removed a human being's natural incentive to work -- his initiative, his spontaneous creative energy -- and replaced it with external motivation and coercion, he would become a lazy and careless worker. But no careless workers kept those lovely farmlands, or made the superb cars and comfortable trains. The lure and compulsion of profit was evidently a much more effective replacement of the natural initiative than he had been led to believe. ↗

— Ursula K. Le Guin

#inequity #iniquity #initiative #profit #business

The essence of a successful business is really quite simple. It is your ability to offer a product or service that people will pay for at a price sufficiently above your costs, ideally three or four or five times your cost, thereby giving you a profit that enables you to buy and to offer more products and services. ↗

— Brian Tracy

#promotion #success #business

Now you're being sentimental, Marija. You shouldn't waste your pity on machines! If you want to pity someone, pity the poor guestworker who's chucked out of the territory when they build a robot to do his job! Pity the janitors, the nightwatchmen, the dustcart drivers. My God, even the whores have been put out of business now! We live in a country where we even fuck machines! ↗

— Chris Beckett

#expropriation #worker-rights #business