Stephen R. Covey

Private victories precede public victories. You can’t invert that process any more than you can harvest a crop before you plant it.

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.

Wisdom is your perspective on life, your sense of balance, your understanding of how the various parts and principles apply and relate to each other. It embraces judgment, discernment, comprehension. It is a gestalt or oneness, and integrated wholeness.

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.

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

Every human has four endowments- self awareness, conscience, independent will and creative imagination. These give us the ultimate human freedom… The power to choose, to respond, to change.

I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.

It isn’t what you have or who you are or where you are or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about it.

Think of yourself as on the threshold of unparalleled success. A whole, clear, glorious life lies before you. Achieve! Achieve!

I maintained my edge by always being a student; you will always have something new to learn.

Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.

You can do it all. Don’t ever let anyone limit you. As long as you are authentic to you, do you.

The number one reason people fail in life is because they listen to their friends, family, and neighbors.

When a true genius appears in this world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.

I would say to do you and do you well. Don’t try to be anyone else. Don’t try to emulate what someone is doing. Play to your strengths. Even if you see someone onstage that is killing it, don’t try to do what they’re doing. Just keep doing you.

Only men of character are trusted.

It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.

I didn’t get there by wishing for it or hoping for it, but by working for it.

How dare you settle for less when the world has made it so easy for you to be remarkable?

It is in self-limitation that a master first shows himself.

People who have good relationships at home are more effective in the marketplace.