Stephen Covey Quotes

Building and repairing relationships are long-term investments.

Live out of your imagination, not your history.

If you're proactive, you don't have to wait for circumstances or other people to create perspective expanding experiences. You can consciously create your own.

A personal mission statement becomes the DNA for every other decision we make.

A cardinal principle of Total Quality escapes too many managers: you cannot continuously improve interdependent systems and processes until you progressively perfect interdependent, interpersonal relationships.

Vision is about more than just getting things done, accomplishing some task, achieving something; it is about discovering and expanding our view of others, affirming them, believing in them, and helping them discover and realize the potential within them-helping them find their own voice.

Retire from your job but never from meaningful projects. If you want to live a long life, you need eustress, that is, a deep sense of meaning and of contribution to worthy projects and causes, particularly, your intergenerational family.

He who has a why can deal with any what or how.

Just as the education of nerve and sinew is vital to the excellent athlete and education of the mind is vital to the scholar, education of the conscience is vital to the truly proactive, highly effective person. Training and educating the conscience, however, requires even greater concentration, more balanced discipline, more consistently honest living. It requires regular feasting on inspiring literature, thinking noble thoughts and, above all, living in harmony with its still small voice.

Once you have a clear picture of your priorities - that is values, goals, and high leverage activities - organize around them.

I define discipline as the ability to make + keep promises and to honor commitments.

The great contributors in life are those who, though afraid of the knock at the door, still answer it.

People don't listen to understand. They listen to reply. The collective monologue is everyone talking and no one listening.

To Retain those who are present, be loyal to those who are absent.

Everyone has values; even criminal gangs have values. Values govern people's behavior but principles govern the consequences of those behaviors.

I'm convinced that we can write and live our own scripts more than most people will acknowledge. I also know the price that must be paid. It's a real struggle to do it. It requires visualization and affirmation. It involves living a life of integrity, starting with making and keeping promises, until the whole human personality the senses, the thinking, the feeling, and the intuition are ultimately integrated and harmonized.

There's no better way to inform and expand you mind on a regular basis than to get into the habit of reading good literature.

Effective people stay out of Quadrants III and IV because, urgent or not, they aren't important. They also shrink Quadrant I down to size by spending more time in Quadrant II...Quadrant II is the heart of effective personal management.

The greatest risk is the risk of riskless living.

Some people achieve the top of the ladder and only then realise it was standing against the wrong wall.

Want to improve your relationships? See love as a verb rather than as a feeling?

Highly proactive people don't blame circumstances, conditions, or conditioning for their behavior. Their behavior is a product of their own conscious choice.

The person who is truly effective has the humility and reverence to recognize his own perceptual limitations and to appreciate the rich resources available through interaction with the hearts and minds of other human beings.

Only after we can learn to forgive ourselves can we accept others as they are because we don't feel threatened by anything about them which is better than us.

When we succumb to believing that we are victims of our circumstances and yield to the plight of determinism, we lose hope, we lose drive, and we settle into resignation and stagnation.

Every exaggeration of the truth once detected by others destroys our credibility and makes all that we do and say suspect.

If two people have the same opinion, one is unnecessary. ... I don't want to talk, to communicate, with someone who agrees with me; I want to communicate with you because you see it differently. I value that difference.

Reactive people... are often affected by their physical environment. They find external sources to blame for their behavior.

Whether you're on a sports team, in an office or a member of a family, if you can't trust one another there's going to be trouble.

I don't read blogs but occasionally people tell me about what they contain, and I do take questions that come from blogs.

It takes courage to realize that you are greater than your moods, greater than your thoughts, and that you can control your moods and thoughts.

Writing is another powerful way to sharpen the mental saw. Keeping a journal of our thoughts, experiences, insights, and learnings promotes mental clarity, exactness, and context.

The more aware we are of our basic paradigms, maps, or assumptions, and the extent to which we have been influenced by our experience, the more we can take responsibility for those paradigms, examine them, test them against reality, listen to others and be open to their perceptions, thereby getting a larger picture and a far more objective view.

The roots of the problems we face in the world, in our national life, and in our family and personal lives are spiritual.

We hear a lot about identity theft when someone takes your wallet and pretends to be you and uses your credit cards. But the more serious identity theft is to get swallowed up in other people's definition of you.

Unfortunately, too many executives believe the myths about trust. Myths like how trust is soft and is merely a social virtue. The reality is that trust is hard-edged and is an economic driver.

Balance isn't either/or; it's 'and'.

The highest challenge inside organizations is to enable each person to contribute his or her unique talents and passion to accomplish the organization's purpose.

Our problems and pain are universal and increasing, and the solutions to the problems are and always will be based upon universal, timeless, self-evident principles common to every enduring, prospering society throughout history.

If you can hire people whose passion intersects with the job, they won't require any supervision at all. They will manage themselves better than anyone could ever manage them. Their fire comes from within, not from without. Their motivation is internal, not external.

Courage isn't absenct of fear, it is the awareness that something else is important

Peace of counscious is greater than peace of mind. Peace of mind is more externally oriented. Peace of consciousness is when you know you have been honest in all your business dealings.

The key is in not spending time, but in investing it.

It's better to be humbled by the word than by the force of circumstances.

Principles are natural laws that are external to us and that ultimately control the consequences of our actions. Values are internal and subjective and represent that which we feel strongest about in guiding our behavior.

It's not only a matter of when to do things, but whether or not to do them at all.

The key to the 99 is the one. Or, put another way, the key to the group is the one individual. Think about the one, talk to the one, regard the one, serve the one. If you are sincere and constant, you will discover that gradually your influence with the many will be magnified.

Management is efficiency in climbing the ladder of success