Stephen Covey Quotes

Whether we are aware of it or not, whether we are in control of it or not, there is a first creation to every part of our lives. We are either the second creation of our own proactive design, or we are the second creation of other people's agendas, of circumstances, or of past habits.

People will always have an opinion, but you have to live life the way you want to. It's very easy to tell others what to do, but difficult to implement it on yourself.

A lot of people go through life thinking that they don't have any control, that life is just happening to them. But that's not true.

In our personal lives, if we do not develop our own self-awareness and become responsible for first creations, we empower other people and circumstances to shape our lives by default.

When I talk about self-management, self-regulation, self-government, the word I emphasize is self, and my concern is with the reconstruction of the self. Marxists and even many, I think, overly enthusiastic anarchists have neglected that self.

No one knows you better than you know yourself. Do the thing you want. Don't wait for someone else

We only get to be one person; we don't even get to choose that person. By the time we get ahold of ourselves, we are pieces already in play.

We must become masters of our own actions and attitudes. To let another person determine whether we will be rude or gracious, elated or depressed is to give control of ourselves. The only true possession is self possession.

Be wary of those who seek to steal your dream. Be even more wary of those who seek to tell you what your dream should be.

Nobody can decide for himself whether he is going to be a human being. The only question open to him is whether he will be an ignorant undeveloped one or one who has sought to reach the highest point he is capable of attaining.

I thought The Limits of Control could be interpreted in two ways: as the limits of one's self-control; and as the limits of allowing other people's control over one's - consciousness - which I kind of thought was a double meaning that was appropriate.

I don't know the role I'm playing. I only know it's mine, non-convertible.

Once you assume your right to interfere in other people's problems they become in some ways more of a worry than your own, for with your own you can at least do what you think best, but other people always show such a persistent tendency to do the wrong thing.

My political philosophy as a libertarian says that government has no business intervening in any consensual private behavior. My professional ethic as a thinker and writer, however, says that self-knowledge is our ultimate responsibility

I have to live my life. I have a family and I just think it's absurd to let other people influence the way you live.

You are the single biggest influence in your life.

You know, people make a lot of money talking about me, don't they? They just get on those shows, and they talk away. There's nothing I can do. And that's one of the great lessons I try to convey in my book, which my mother implanted in me as a young girl.. Is you can either be an actor in your own life, or a reactor in somebody else's.

Are you a slave to your self-centered nature or does your divine nature guide your life? Do you kow that every moment of your life you're creating through thought? You create your own inner condition; you're helping create the conditions around you.

If all responsibility is imposed on you, then you may want to exploit the moment and want to be overwhelmed by the responsibility;yet if you try, you will notice that nothing was imposed on you, but that you are yourself this responsibility.

All successes begin with Self-Discipline. It starts with you.

Ambition means tying your well-being to what other people say or do. Self-indulgence means tying it to the things that happen to you. Sanity means tying it to your own actions.

It is the part of an uneducated person to blame others where he himself fares ill; to blame himself is the part of one whose education has begun; to blame neither another nor his own self is the part of one whose education is already complete.

It is time to stop looking outside yourself for the answers to why you haven't created the life and results you want, for it is you who creates the quality of life you lead and the results you produce. You-no one else! To achieve major success in life-to achieve those things that are most important to you-you must assume 100% responsibility for your life. Nothing less will do.

Everyone seems to have a clear idea of how other people should lead their lives, but none about his or her own.

In any influence, will, a self, the ego, the I AM is the greater force to be dealt with, but as numbers do influence, a knowledge of same certainly gives an individual a foresight into relationships.