Top 500 Stephen R. Covey Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “People are social beings and want interaction. Social learning is the primary form of learning, just as word-of-mouth advertising is the highest form of advertising.”

— Stephen R. Covey

152. “Being is seeing in the human dimension.”

— Stephen R. Covey

153. “You should seek effectiveness with people and efficiency with things.”

— Stephen R. Covey

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

— Stephen R. Covey

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

— Stephen R. Covey

156. “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

Featured in: Marketing Quotes

157. “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

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

— Stephen R. Covey

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

— Stephen R. Covey

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

— Stephen R. Covey

161. “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

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

— Stephen R. Covey

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

— Stephen R. Covey

164. “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

165. “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

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

— Stephen R. Covey

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

— Stephen R. Covey

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

— Stephen R. Covey

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

— Stephen R. Covey

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

— Stephen R. Covey

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

— Stephen R. Covey

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

— Stephen R. Covey

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

— Stephen R. Covey

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

— Stephen R. Covey

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

— Stephen R. Covey

176. “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

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

— Stephen R. Covey

178. “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

179. “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

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

— Stephen R. Covey

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

— Stephen R. Covey

182. “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

183. “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

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

— Stephen R. Covey

185. “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

186. “Synergy is the highest activity of life; it creates new untapped alternatives; it values and exploits the mental, emotional, and psychological differences between people.”

— Stephen R. Covey

187. “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

188. “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

189. “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

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

— Stephen R. Covey

Featured in: Integrity Quotes, Principles And Laws

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

— Stephen R. Covey

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

— Stephen R. Covey

193. “You have two ears and one mouth. Use them accordingly.”

— Stephen R. Covey

194. “The first job of a leader-at work or at home-is to inspire trust. It’s to bring out the best in people by entrusting them with meaningful stewardships, and to create an environment in which high-trust interaction inspires creativity and possibility.”

— Stephen R. Covey

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

— Stephen R. Covey

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

— Stephen R. Covey

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

— Stephen R. Covey

Featured in: Courage Quotes, Wednesday Motivational Quotes, Thursday Motivational Quotes

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

— Stephen R. Covey

199. “Always surround yourself with people who are even more talented and competent than you.”

— Stephen R. Covey

200. “In order to have influence, you have to be influenced.”

— Stephen R. Covey

Featured in: Self-Improvement Quotes