Stephen R. Covey Quotes

It is in the ordinary events of every day that we develop the proactive capacity to handle the extraordinary pressures of life. It’s how we make and keep commitments, how we handle a traffic jam, how we respond to an irate customer or a disobedient child. It’s how we view our problems and where we focus our energies. It’s the language we use.

People who exercise their embryonic freedom day after day, little by little, expand that freedom. People who do not will find that it withers until they are literally being lived. They are acting out scripts written by parents, associates and society.

We are not animals. We are not a product of what has happened to us in our past. We have the power of choice.

Priority is a function of context.

Time management is really a misnomer; the challenge is not to manage time, but to manage ourselves.

In addition to self-awareness, imagination and conscience, it is the fourth human endowment-independent will-that really makes effective self-management possible. It is the ability to make decisions and choices and to act in accordance with them. It is the ability to act rather than to be acted upon, to proactively carry out the program we have developed through the other three endowments. Empowerment comes from learning how to use this great endowment in the decisions we make every day.

In the last analysis, what we are communicates far more eloquently than anything we say or do.

Our character is basically a composite of our habits. Because they are consistent, often unconcious patterns, they constantly, daily, express our character

Live out of your imagination, not your history.

Whatever is at the center of our life will be the source of our security, guidance, wisdom, and power.

Security represents your sense of worth, your identity, your emotional anchorage, your self-esteem, your basic personal strength or lack of it.

I am not a product of my circumstances. I am a product of my decisions.

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.

Public behavior is merely private character writ large.

To learn and not to do is really not to learn. To know and not to do is really not to know.

Be patient with yourself. Self-growth is tender; it’s holy ground. There’s no greater investment.

Love – THE FEELING – is a fruit of love, the verb.

The ability to manage well doesn’t make much difference if you’re not even in the right jungle.

We simply assume that the way we see things is the way they really are or the way they should be. And our attitudes and behaviors grow out of these assumptions.

Power is the faculty or capacity to act, the strength and potency to accomplish something. It is the vital energy to make choices and decisions. It also includes the capacity to overcome deeply embedded habits and to cultivate higher, more effective ones.

There are three constants in life… change, choice and principles.