But if you can create an honorable livelihood, where you take your skills and use them and you earn a living from it, it gives you a sense of freedom and allows you to balance your life the way you want.

If you do things well, do them better. Be daring, be first, be different, be just.

But if you can create an honorable livelihood, where you take your skills and use them and you earn a living from it, it gives you a sense of freedom and allows you to balance your life the way you want.

When you run an entrepreneurial business, you have hurry sickness - you don't look back, you advance and consolidate. But it is such fun.

There is no scientific answer for success. You can't define it. You've simply got to live it and do it.

Look at the Quakers - they were excellent business people that never lied, never stole; they cared for their employees and the community which gave them the wealth. They never took more money out than they put back in.

If I can't do something for the public good, what the hell am I doing?

If I had learned more about business ahead of time, I would have been shaped into believing that it was only about finances and quality management.

I believe in businesses where you engage in creative thinking, and where you form some of your deepest relationships. If it isn't about the production of the human spirit, we are in big trouble.

I traveled enormously during the 1960's, when you measured everything by where you traveled and what you did as travelers.

Since the governments are in the pockets of businesses, who's going to control this most powerful institution? Business is more powerful than politics, and it's more powerful than religion. So it's going to have to be the vigilante consumer.

Consumers have not been told effectively enough that they have huge power and that purchasing and shopping involve a moral choice.

The money that we make from the company goes into The Body Shop Foundation, which isn't one of those awful tax shelters like some in America. It just functions to take the money and give it away.

I am still looking for the modern equivalent of those Quakers who ran successful businesses, made money because they offered honest products and treated their people decently... This business creed, sadly, seems long forgotten.

I want to work for a company that contributes to and is part of the community. I want something not just to invest in. I want something to believe in.

The end result of kindness is that it draws people to you.

Over the past decade... while many businesses have pursued what I call 'business as usual,' I have been part of a different, smaller business movement, one that tried to put idealism back on the agenda.

The movement for the environment really only started in the mid 1970's.

I didn't go to business school, didn't care about financial stuff and the stock market.

If you think you're too small to have an impact, try going to bed with a mosquito.

All through history, there have always been movements where business was not just about the accumulation of proceeds but also for the public good.

At The Body Shop we had always been measured by how many jobs we had created, and I got a major award from the Queen on that.

The market controls everything, but the market has no heart.

Nobody talks of entrepreneurship as survival, but that's exactly what it is and what nurtures creative thinking.

But the minute we went public on the stock market, which is how our wealth was created, it was no longer how many people you employed, it was how much you were worth and how much your company was worth.

The Body Shop Foundation is run by our staff and supports social activism and environmental activism. We don't tend to support big agencies.

Years ago nobody was elected on the economic ticket. It was either the education platform, or it was health or it was other issues. It is only recently that economic values have superceded every other human value.

Whatever you do, be different - that was the advice my mother gave me, and I can’t think of better advice for an entrepreneur. If you’re different, you will stand out.

Business is not financial science its about trading.. buying and selling. Its about creating a product or service so good that people will pay for it.

Irritation is a great source of energy and creativity.

Nobody talks about entrepreneurship as survival but thats exactly what it is and what nurtures creative thinking. Running that first shop taught me business is not financial science its about trading buying and selling.

We entrepreneurs are loners, vagabonds, troublemakers. Success is simply a matter of finding and surrounding ourselves with those open-minded and clever souls who can take our insanity and put it to good use.

Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.

I believe as human beings we are out of balance, out of synch with the earth.

But all the money in the world cannot make you happy either, so there has to be a balance.

In almost every country there are elements of opinion which would welcome such a conclusion because they wish to return to the politics of the balance of power, unrestricted and unregulated armaments, international anarchy, and preparation for war.

But if you can create an honorable livelihood, where you take your skills and use them and you earn a living from it, it gives you a sense of freedom and allows you to balance your life the way you want.

And Big Night, I think by the end the brothers find that balance, when they touch each other on the shoulder over breakfast and it's understood that what should never have driven them apart almost drove them apart. I think that's a true moment.

Remember Graham Green's dictum that childhood is the bank balance of the writer? I think that all writers feel alienated. Most of us go back to an alienated childhood in some way or another. I know that I do.

In 1844, there was a balance of perhaps of a couple of thousand dollars on the cr side.

You need a balance in life between dealing with what's going on inside and not being so absorbed in yourself that it takes over.

We believe, in fact, that the one act of respect has little force unless matched by the other - in balance with it... The acting out of that dual respect I would name as precisely the source of our power.

You can't have too much of everything, you must have a balance, that's very important.

I've watched those shows my whole life - being on one is like a dream. It's hard to balance that dream with the fact that this is the Edie I've known my whole life.

Action is at bottom a swinging and flailing of the arms to regain one's balance and keep afloat.

I think what I'm going to do is get more balance in my life to still be able to go out and play the hard rock 'n' roll and do what I like to do in music.

We have managed to acquire $13 trillion of debt on our balance sheet. In my view we have nothing to show for it. We haven't invested in our roads, our bridges, our waste-water systems, our sewer systems. We haven't even maintained the assets that our parents and grandparents built for us.

I balanced all, brought all to mind, the years to come seemed waste of breath, a waste of breath the years behind, in balance with this life, this death.

It sounds extraordinary but it's a fact that balance sheets can make fascinating reading.