Top 500 Stephen R. Covey Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “If you don’t choose to do it in leadership time up front, you do it in crisis management time down the road.”

— Stephen R. Covey

352. “We tend to get what we expect – both from ourselves and from others. When we expect more, we tend to get more; when we expect less, we tend to get less.”

— Stephen R. Covey

353. “If you don’t know yourself, if you don’t control yourself, if you don’t have mastery over yourself, it’s very hard to like yourself, except in some short-term, psych-up, superficial way.”

— Stephen R. Covey

354. “In the end, life teaches us what is important, and that is family.”

— Stephen R. Covey

355. “Above all, success in business requires two things: a winning competitive strategy, and superb organizational execution. Distrust is the enemy of both. I submit that while high trust won’t necessarily rescue a poor strategy, low trust will almost always derail a good one.”

— Stephen R. Covey

356. “The most important ingredient we put into any relationship is not what we say or what we do, but what we are.”

— Stephen R. Covey

357. “Keeping a personal journal a daily in-depth analysis and evaluation of your experiences is a high-leverage activity that increases self-awareness and enhances all the endowments and the synergy among them.”

— Stephen R. Covey

358. “It’s not that we ignore our weaknesses; rather, we make our weaknesses irrelevant by working effectively with others so that we compensate for our weaknesses through their strengths and they compensate for their weaknesses through our strengths.”

— Stephen R. Covey

359. “The personal power that comes from principle-centered living is the power of a self-aware, knowledgeable, proactive individual, unrestricted by the attitudes, behaviors, and actions of others or by many of the circumstances and environmental influences that limit other people.”

— Stephen R. Covey

360. “Patience is emotional diligence.”

— Stephen R. Covey

361. “By behaving in ways that build trust with one, you build trust with many.”

— Stephen R. Covey

362. “You can buy a person’s hands but you can’t buy his heart. His heart is where his enthusiasm, his loyalty is.”

— Stephen R. Covey

363. “Ineffective people live day after day with unused potential.”

— Stephen R. Covey

364. “When you make a commitment to yourself, do so with the clear understanding that you’re pledging your integrity.”

— Stephen R. Covey

365. “A moment of choice is a moment of truth.”

— Stephen R. Covey

366. “Strategy is important, but trust is the hidden variable. On paper you can have clarity around your objectives, but in a low-trust environment, your strategy won’t be executed.”

— Stephen R. Covey

367. “Prepare your mind and heart before you prepare your speech. What we say may be less important than how we say it.”

— Stephen R. Covey

368. “The best way to develop courage is to set a goal and achieve it, make a promise and keep it.”

— Stephen R. Covey

369. “We must not let the actions or words of others determine our responses. Magnanimous people make the choice to respond to the indignities of others based upon their own principles and their own value system rather than their moods or anger.”

— Stephen R. Covey

370. “Most learning is social, or what I call the cultural DNA. Everyone knows that word of mouth advertising is the best advertising. That’s social learning.”

— Stephen R. Covey

371. “Only as we keep an open communication with our deep inner life will we have the wisdom to make effective choices.”

— Stephen R. Covey

372. “People behave more on the basis of how they feel than how they think; unless there are good feelings between people, it is almost impossible to reason intelligently.”

— Stephen R. Covey

373. “How many on their deathbeds wished they’d spent more time at the office – or watching TV? The answer is, No one.”

— Stephen R. Covey

374. “Love – the feeling – is a fruit of love, the verb.”

— Stephen R. Covey

375. “If you don’t let a teacher know what level you are – by asking a question, or revealing your ignorance – you will not learn or grow.”

— Stephen R. Covey

376. “Most people think of leadership as a position and therefore don’t see themselves as leaders.”

— Stephen R. Covey

377. “When we value correct principles, we have truth – a knowledge of things as they are.”

— Stephen R. Covey

378. “Success in one role can’t justify failure in another.”

— Stephen R. Covey

379. “Management is formal authority given from above. Leadership is moral authority given from below and all around.”

— Stephen R. Covey

380. “In the long run, you can never accomplish a worthy end with an unworthy means.”

— Stephen R. Covey

381. “We’re constantly making choices about the way we spend our time. The issue is not between the good and the bad, but between the good and the best. So often, the enemy of the best is the good.”

— Stephen R. Covey

382. “He who has a why can deal with any what or how.”

— Stephen R. Covey

383. “Trust is the glue in relationships and organizations.”

— Stephen R. Covey

384. “Despite all our gains in technology, product innovation and world markets, most people are not thriving in the organizations they work for.”

— Stephen R. Covey

385. “Principle-centered people are constantly educated by their experiences.”

— Stephen R. Covey

386. “The universal elements are integrity, vision, discipline, passion, governed by conscience. Conscience has been educated through studying and pondering the universal, timeless principles of all six major world religions.”

— Stephen R. Covey

387. “It takes a great deal of character strength to apologize quickly out of one’s heart rather than out of pity.”

— Stephen R. Covey

388. “To set and work toward any goal is an act of courage.”

— Stephen R. Covey

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

— Stephen R. Covey

390. “The more people rationalize cheating, the more it becomes a culture of dishonesty. And that can become a vicious, downward cycle. Because suddenly, if everyone else is cheating, you feel a need to cheat, too.”

— Stephen R. Covey

391. “What we are communicates far more eloquently than anything we say or do. There are people we trust because we know their character. Whether they’re eloquent or not, whether they have human-relations techniques or not, we trust them and work with them.”

— Stephen R. Covey

392. “Admission of ignorance is often the first step in our education.”

— Stephen R. Covey

393. “So often the problem is in the system, not in the people. 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

394. “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.”

— Stephen R. Covey

395. “We must look at the lens through we see the world, as well as the world we see, and that the lens itself shapes how we interpret the world.”

— Stephen R. Covey

396. “Sometimes poor behavior is simply bad execution of good intent.”

— Stephen R. Covey

397. “Communication is the most important single activity of man.”

— Stephen R. Covey

398. “There are principles that govern human effectiveness – natural laws in the human dimension that are just as real, just as unchanging and unarguably there as laws such as gravity are in the physical dimension.”

— Stephen R. Covey

399. “In a very real sense, there are only two roles in organisations: customers and suppliers. Everybody functions simultaneously in both roles, whether inside or outside the organisation the essence of good business, therefore, is the quality of the relationship between customer and supplier.”

— Stephen R. Covey

400. “You can’t have the fruits without the roots. It’s the principle of sequencing: Private Victories proceed Public Victories. Self-mastery and self-discipline are the foundation of good relationships with others.”

— Stephen R. Covey