Stephen R. Covey

Ineffective people live day after day with unused potential. They experience synergy only in small, peripheral ways in their lives. But creative experiences can be produced regularly, consistently, almost daily in people’s lives. It requires enormous personal security and openness and a spirit of adventure.

Priority is a function of context.

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.

The character ethic, which I believe to be the foundation of success, teaches that there are basic principles of effective living, and that people can only experience true success and enduring happiness as they learn and integrate these principles into their basic character.

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

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.

If emotional pain or problems have cropped up in your life, you must insist on getting closure. Closure means you don’t carry the problem or the pain. You address the issue, then you slam shut the book and put it away.

The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself.

One of the things I realized is that if you do not take control over your time and your life, other people will gobble it up. If you don’t prioritize yourself, you constantly start falling lower and lower on your list, your kids fall lower and lower on your list.

The secret of life is to validate your existence.

If you foul up, tell the President and correct it fast. Delay only compounds mistakes.

Everything intelligent is so boring.

You either get it or you don’t. Become one of those who get it.

Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.

Apparently there is nothing that cannot happen today.

The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.

Loving smart means believing in you, your worth and your value.

I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.

No one can be helped unless he can be put in the way of helping himself.

Just because you like my stuff doesn’t mean I owe you anything.

We live by the Golden Rule. Those who have the gold make the rules.