Top 500 Stephen R. Covey Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “You think effectiveness with people and efficiency with things.”

— Stephen R. Covey

152. “As long as you think the problem is out there, that very thought is the problem.”

— Stephen R. Covey

153. “Interdependence is a higher value than independence.”

— Stephen R. Covey

154. “Network marketing has come of age. It’s undeniable that it has become a way to entrepreneurship and independence for millions of people.”

— Stephen R. Covey

155. “True leadership is moral authority, not formal authority. Leadership is a choice, not a position. The choice is to follow universal timeless principles, which will build trust and respect from the entire organization. Those with formal authority alone will lose this trust and respect.”

— Stephen R. Covey

156. “Building and repairing relationships are long-term investments.”

— Stephen R. Covey

157. “If we want to make relatively minor changes in our lives, we can perhaps appropriately focus on our attitudes and behaviors. But if we want to make significant, quantum change, we need to work on our basic paradigms.”

— Stephen R. Covey

158. “While we cannot always choose what happens to us, we can choose our responses.”

— Stephen R. Covey

159. “The key is taking responsibility and initiative, deciding what your life is about and prioritizing your life around the most important things.”

— Stephen R. Covey

160. “I teach people how to treat me by what I will allow.”

— Stephen R. Covey

161. “A moment of choice is a moment of truth. It’s the testing point of our character and competence.”

— Stephen R. Covey

162. “Success is when you realize obstacles you face are challenges to help you become better – and your response equals the challenge.”

— Stephen R. Covey

163. “Each of us guard a gate of change that can only be opened from the inside.”

— Stephen R. Covey

164. “Happen to things, don’t let things happen to you.”

— Stephen R. Covey

165. “Vision is seeing a future state with the mind’s eye. Vision is applied imagination.”

— Stephen R. Covey

166. “Doing the right things for the right reason in the right way is the key to Quality of Life!”

— Stephen R. Covey

167. “If you put good people in bad systems you get bad results. You have to water the flowers you want to grow.”

— Stephen R. Covey

168. “A good affirmation has five basic ingredients: it’s personal, it’s positive, it’s present tense, it’s visual, and it’s emotional.”

— Stephen R. Covey

169. “Remember, technology is a great servant, but a terrible master.”

— Stephen R. Covey

170. “Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space lies our freedom and power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our happiness.”

— Stephen R. Covey

171. “Effective communication is built on the cement of trust. And trust is based on trustworthiness, not politics.”

— Stephen R. Covey

172. “If you don’t have confidence in the diagnosis, you won’t have confidence in the prescription.”

— Stephen R. Covey

173. “Our greatest joy and our greatest pain comes in our relationships with others.”

— Stephen R. Covey

174. “If I were to summarize in one sentence the single most important principle I have learned in the field of interpersonal relations, it would be this: Seek first to understand, then to be understood. This principle is the key to effective interpersonal communication.”

— Stephen R. Covey

175. “Peace of mind comes when your life is in harmony with true principles and values and in no other way.”

— Stephen R. Covey

176. “As you live your values, your sense of identity, integrity, control, and inner-directedness will infuse you with both exhilaration and peace. You will define yourself from within, rather than by people’s opinions or by comparisons to others.”

— Stephen R. Covey

177. “Life is not accumulation, it is about contribution.”

— Stephen R. Covey

178. “We develop our character muscles by overcoming challenges and obstacles.”

— Stephen R. Covey

179. “If there’s one thing that’s certain in business, it’s uncertainty.”

— Stephen R. Covey

180. “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.”

— Stephen R. Covey

181. “If you don’t set your goals based upon your Mission Statement, you may be climbing the ladder of success only to realize, when you get to the top, you’re on the WRONG building.”

— Stephen R. Covey

182. “Nothing is more exciting and bonding in relationships than creating together.”

— Stephen R. Covey

183. “Most leaders would agree that they’d be better off having an average strategy with superb execution than a superb strategy with poor execution. Those who execute always have the upper hand.”

— Stephen R. Covey

184. “The ability to subordinate an impulse to a value is the essence of the proactive person. Reactive people are driven by feelings, by circumstances, by conditions, by their environment. Proactive people are driven by values – carefully thought about, selected and internalized values.”

— Stephen R. Covey

185. “Management works in the system; leadership works on the system.”

— Stephen R. Covey

186. “Each of us tends to think we see things as they are, that we are objective. But this is not the case. We see the world, not as it is, but as we are – or as we are conditioned to see it.”

— Stephen R. Covey

187. “Technology and tools are useful and powerful when they are your servant and not your master.”

— Stephen R. Covey

188. “Trust is a powerful accelerator to performance and when trust goes up, speed also goes up while cost comes down – producing what we call a trust dividend.”

— Stephen R. Covey

189. “Human beings are not things needing to be motivated and controlled; they are four dimensional – body, mind, heart, and spirit.”

— Stephen R. Covey

190. “Exercise integrity in the moment of truth.”

— Stephen R. Covey

191. “The key to growth is to learn to make promises and to keep them.”

— Stephen R. Covey

192. “Integrity in the Moment of Choice Quality of life depends on what happens in the space between stimulus and response.”

— Stephen R. Covey

193. “The ability to subordinate an impulse to a value is the essence of the proactive person.”

— Stephen R. Covey

194. “I can change. I can live out of my imagination instead of my memory. I can tie myself to my limitless potential instead of my limiting past.”

— Stephen R. Covey

195. “You can’t have the fruits without the roots.”

— Stephen R. Covey

196. “The process of building trust is an interesting one, but it begins with yourself, with what I call self trust, and with your own credibility, your own trustworthiness. If you think about it, it’s hard to establish trust with others if you can’t trust yourself.”

— Stephen R. Covey

197. “What you see often depends on what you are looking for.”

— Stephen R. Covey

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

— Stephen R. Covey

199. “Courage isn’t absence of fear, it is the awareness that something else is important.”

— Stephen R. Covey

200. “Moral authority comes from following universal and timeless principles like honesty, integrity, treating people with respect.”

— Stephen R. Covey