Quotes from Stephen R. Covey

Animals do not possess this ability. We call it "self-awareness" or the ability to think about your very thought process.

it is that a meaningful life is not a matter of speed or efficiency. It's much more a matter of what you do and why you do it, than how fast you get it done.

What one thing could you do in your personal and professional life that, if you did it on a regular basis, would make a tremendous positive difference in your life?

No matter how long we've walked life's pathway to mediocrity, we can always choose to switch paths. Always. It's never too late. We can find our voice.

It's incredibly easy to get caught up in the thick of thin things.

What lies behind us is nothing compared to what lies within us and ahead of us.

He (Anwar Sadat) records that he was almost loathe to leave his prison cell because it was there that he realized that real success is success with self. It's not in having things, but in having mastery, having victory over self.

While we must learn from good examples and keep always in mind the bigger goal, we must compare ourselves only with ourselves. We can't focus or base our happiness on another's progress; we can focus only on our own.

What you are shouts so loudly in my ears I cannot hear what you say.

The little-understood concept of interdependence appears to many to smack of dependence, and therefore, we find people, often for selfish reasons, leaving their marriages, abandoning their children, and forsaking all kinds of social responsibility—all in the name of independence.

The most important ingredient we put into any relationship is not what we say or what we do, but what we are.

because more important than how fast you're going, is where you're headed.

Basing our happiness on our ability to control everything is futile. While we do control our choice of action, we cannot control the consequences of our choices.

The Lord works from the inside out. The world works from the outside in. The world would take people out of the slums. Christ takes the slums out of people, and then they take themselves out of the slums. The world would mold men by changing their environment. Christ changes men, who then change their environment. The world would shape human behavior, but Christ can change human nature. EZRA TAFT BENSON

Urgency addiction is a self-destructive behavior that temporarily fills the void created by unmet needs. And instead of meeting these needs, the tools and approaches of time management often feed the addiction. They keep us focused on daily prioritization of the urgent.

But you can't change the fruit without changing the root.

The more closely our maps or paradigms are aligned with these principles or natural laws, the more accurate and functional they will be

Other parts of the personality approach were clearly manipulative, even deceptive, encouraging people to use techniques to get other people to like them, or to fake interest in the hobbies of others to get out of them what they wanted, or to use the "power look," or to intimidate their way through life.

Principles are like lighthouses. They are natural laws that cannot be broken. As Cecil B. DeMille observed of the principles contained in his monumental movie, The Ten Commandments, "It is impossible for us to break the law. We can only break ourselves against the law." While

There's no way we can escape accountability. We do make a difference—one way or the other. We are responsible for the impact of our lives.

I am what I am today because of the choices I made yesterday

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. ARISTOTLE Our character, basically, is a composite of our habits. "Sow a thought, reap an action; sow an action, reap a habit; sow a habit, reap a character; sow a character, reap a destiny," the maxim goes.

Show me someone who is humble enough to accept and take responsibility for his or her circumstances and courageous enough to take whatever initiative is necessary to creatively work his or her way through or around these challenges, and I'll show you the supreme power of choice.

In the words of Gandhi, "They cannot take away our self respect if we do not give it to them.