Stephen Covey Quotes

Behaviors are a choice. Feelings are sometimes out of our control. Behavior has to do with choices.

As human beings, we are responsible for our own lives. Our behavior is a function of our decisions, not our conditions. We can subordinate feelings to values.

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

As much as you may want to, you can't control what other people say or do; you can only control yourself.

I might be in an airport, late or angry with a ticket person, and I'm going to sort of check myself, because part of me is seen as Eric Camden. We all need as much help as we can get. It's a role model to me as much as to anybody else.

We can't determine our emotions, but we can choose our attitudes and actions.

I have never been offended. I don't know what it means. It's not that I disagree with it. I don't understand it. I've never had that feeling. I don't let feelings control my life. I'm more disciplined than other people.

The important thing is that I control my reaction, my behavior, my attitude and my words. What I receive back is not in my control.

If it's in your control, why do you do it? If it's in someone else's control, then who are you blaming? Atoms? The gods? Stupid either way. Blame no one. Set people straight, if you can. If not, just repair the damage.

The problem is not what other people think, do or say; it is your reaction.

Practice self-discipline and keep emotions under control. Good judgment and common sense are essential.

Character isn't inherited. One builds it daily by the way one thinks and acts, thought by thought, action by action. If one lets fear or hate or anger take possession of the mind, they become self-forged chains.

My behavior is a product of my own conscious choices based on principles, rather than a product of my conditions, based on feelings.

We all have to control our feelings. That's the thing that separates us from animals.

It's not what people do to us that hurts us. In the most fundamental sense, it is our chosen response to what they do to us that hurts us.

The first lesson of life is to burn our own smoke; that is, not to inflict on outsiders our personal sorrows and petty morbidness, not to keep thinking of ourselves as exceptional cases.

Many people don't know about the power of good feelings, and so their feelings are reactions or responses to what happens to them. They have put their feelings on automatic pilot, instead of deliberately taking charge of them.

Keep your attention focused entirely on what is truly your own concern, and be clear that what belongs to others is their business and none of yours.

My father taught me that losing your temper is a self-indulgent act.

I have sometimes wondered also whether in people like me who come to the boil fast (soupe au lait, the French call this trait, like a milk soup that boils over) the tantrum is not a built-in safety valve against madness or illness. ... The fierce tension in me, when it is properly channeled, creates the good tension for work. But when it becomes unbalanced I am destructive. How to isolate that good tension is my problem these days. Or, put in another way, how to turn the heat down fast enough so the soup won't boil over!

One part of the science of living is to learn just what our own responsibility is, and to let other people's alone.

One must train oneself, by small and frequent efforts, to dominate one's feelings.

The undisciplined are slaves to moods, appetites and passions

Those who have accomplished the greatest results are those...who never grow excited or lose self-control, but are always calm, self-possessed, patient and polite.

You know, it's nothin' quick overnight. If anything happens to you quick, you need to start questioning that. You know, you hear young people go, aw, I'm gonna blow up. You gonna blow up but with a controlled explosion. Don't just blow up all over the place.