Life & Wisdom Quote by Denis Waitley

In one clean pivot, Waitley flips the most overused phrase in business into a moral litmus test. “Bottom line” arrives with its usual corporate chill: the spreadsheet, the quarter, the pressure to reduce messy human decisions into a number. Then he yanks the idiom out of finance and redefines it as character. The sentence works because it grants realism (“You must consider...”) before issuing its rebuke. He’s not preaching from a mountaintop; he’s acknowledging the gravitational pull of profit and insisting on a different center of gravity.

The intent is managerial and motivational, but the subtext is defensive: integrity needs to be named because it’s precisely what gets negotiated away when incentives tighten. Waitley’s construction implies a familiar scenario - leaders who claim they “had no choice,” who treat ethics as a luxury item for good quarters. By making integrity the “bottom line,” he argues it isn’t an add-on or PR varnish; it’s the metric that decides whether the profit even counts.

Context matters. Waitley’s career sits inside late-20th-century American self-improvement and business-culture rhetoric, where success is often framed as mindset plus discipline. This line tries to rescue that genre from cynicism by smuggling in accountability. It also anticipates today’s language of “values” and “mission,” while quietly warning how easily those words become décor. The real challenge embedded here: if integrity is truly first, you sometimes accept a smaller number - and you do it without calling it sacrifice, because it’s simply the price of being credible.