It's hard to deny: the profit you make and the proper business protocol you practice are two activities strongly tied together. Knowing how to be mature in business situations -- from speaking with calm confidence, to dressing appropriately, to even merely arriving on time to meetings -- is a highly powerful strategy that will boost your success in the professional realm.

A company that has a culture full of respect and courtesy is a company that will go to great heights. Still don't believe a mastery of business etiquette should be a high priority? Here are 15 quotes from some of the most successful men and women who may make you think otherwise:

  1. "Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning." -- Bill Gates
  2. "Politeness and consideration for others is like investing pennies and getting dollars back." -- Thomas Sowell
  3. "Courteous treatment will make a customer a walking advertisement." -- James Cash Penney
  4. "Civility costs nothing and buys everything." -- Mary Wortley Montagu
  5. "The ability to get along with people is as purchasable a commodity as sugar and coffee. I pay more for that ability than any under the sun."  -- John D. Rockefeller
  6. "There can be no defense like elaborate courtesy." -- E.V. Lucas
  7. "Standards are not established by your proclamations they are established by your routines." -- T Jay Taylor
  8. "Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together." -- Vincent Van Gogh
  9. "He who observes etiquette but objects to lying is like someone who dresses fashionably but wears no vest." -- Walter Benjamin
  10. "Arriving late was a way of saying that your own time was more valuable than the time of the person who waited for you." ― Karen Joy Fowler
  11. "Etiquette requires us to admire the human race." -- Mark Twain
  12. "Cleanliness and order are not matters of instinct; they are matters of education, and like most great things, you must cultivate a taste for them." -- Benjamin Disraeli 
  13. "We tire of those pleasures we take, but never of those we give."  -- John Petit-Senn
  14. "Success means we go to sleep at night knowing that our talents and abilities were used in a way that served others." -- Marianne Williamson
  15. "A good character carries with it the highest power of causing a thing to be believed." -- Aristotle

If you have a great client list, great team, or great company, all will grow enormously once you master business etiquette. What etiquette will you master today?