Stephen Covey Quotes

American educator, author, businessman and motivational speaker (1932-2012)

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Stephen R. Covey (October 24, 1932 – July 16, 2012) was an American author of the bestselling book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, as well as other books.

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Native Name: Stephen Richards Covey

Alternative Names: Stephen R. Covey

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What one thing could you do in your personal and professional life that, if you did it on a regular basis, would make a tremendous positive difference in your life?

But you can’t change the fruit without changing the root.

Animals do not possess this ability. We call it “self-awareness” or the ability to think about your very thought process.

Doing the right things for the right reason in the right way is the key to Quality of Life!

If our feelings control our actions, it is because we have abdicated our responsibility and empowered them to do so.

It is possible to be busy — very busy — without being very effective.

Basing our happiness on our ability to control everything is futile. While we do control our choice of action, we cannot control the consequences of our choices.

My friend, love is a verb. Love — the feeling — is a fruit of love, the verb. So love her. Serve her. Sacrifice. Listen to her. Empathize. Appreciate. Affirm her. Are you willing to do that?

because more important than how fast you’re going, is where you’re headed.

What you are shouts so loudly in my ears I cannot hear what you say.

We can only achieve quantum improvements in our lives as we quit hacking at the leaves of attitude and behavior and get to work on the root, the paradigms from which our attitudes and behaviors flow.

Urgency addiction is a self-destructive behavior that temporarily fills the void created by unmet needs. And instead of meeting these needs, the tools and approaches of time management often feed the addiction. They keep us focused on daily prioritization of the urgent.

The biggest communication problem is we do not listen to understand. We listen to reply.

It is our willing permission, our consent to what happens to us, that hurts us far more than what happens to us in the first place.

Other parts of the personality approach were clearly manipulative, even deceptive, encouraging people to use techniques to get other people to like them, or to fake interest in the hobbies of others to get out of them what they wanted, or to use the “power look,” or to intimidate their way through life.