Stephen Covey Quotes

220 Stephen Covey Quotes

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Paradigms are powerful because they create the lens through which we see the world.
Stephen Covey

Listening involves patience, openness, and the desire to understand…
Stephen Covey

Borrowing strength builds weakness.
Stephen Covey

Our character… is a composite of our habits.
Stephen Covey

Dependent people need others to get what they want. Independent people can get what they want through their own effort. Interdependent people combine their own efforts with the efforts of others to achieve their greatest success.
Stephen Covey

When two people in a marriage are more concerned about getting the golden eggs, the benefits, than they are in preserving the relationship that makes them possible, they often become insensitive and inconsiderate, neglecting the little kindnesses and courtesies so important to a deep relationship.
Stephen Covey

Real change comes from the inside out.
Stephen Covey

We are not our feelings. We are not our moods. We are not even our thoughts.
Stephen Covey

Our behavior is a function of our decisions, not our conditions.
Stephen Covey

The law of the harvest governs; we will always reap what we sow – no more, no less.
Stephen Covey



When you make a mistake, admit it, correct it, and learn from it – immediately.
Stephen Covey

People who exercise their embryonic freedom day after day will, little by little, expand that freedom.
Stephen Covey

If we do not develop our self-awareness and become responsible for first creations, we empower other people and circumstances… to shape much of our lives by default.
Stephen Covey

To focus on money making as a center will bring about its own undoing.
Stephen Covey

People can’t live with change if there’s not a changeless core inside them.
Stephen Covey

Through imagination, we can visualize the uncreated words of potential that lie within us.
Stephen Covey

All things are created twice. There’s a mental or first creation, and a physical or second creation.
Stephen Covey

You begin with the end in mind.
Stephen Covey

Organize and execute around priorities.
Stephen Covey

True effectiveness requires balance.
Stephen Covey



We can make a promise and keep it. Or we can set a goal and work to achieve it.
Stephen Covey

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

Maturity is the balance between courage and consideration.
Stephen Covey

If you put good people in bad systems, you get bad results. You have to water the flowers you want to grow.
Stephen Covey

Synergy means that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
Stephen Covey

Ineffective people live day after day with unused potential.
Stephen Covey

Principles are like lighthouses. They are natural laws that cannot be broken.
Stephen Covey

Effective interdependence can only be built on a foundation of true independence.
Stephen Covey

Love is a value that is actualized through loving actions.
Stephen Covey

If you want to have a happy marriage, be the kind of person who generates positive energy and sidesteps negative energy rather than empowering it.
Stephen Covey



If you want to have a more pleasant, cooperative teenager, be a more understanding, empathic, consistent, loving parent.
Stephen Covey

Happiness can be defined… as the fruit of the desire and ability to sacrifice what we want know for what we want eventually.
Stephen Covey

Be patient with yourself. Self-growth is tender; it’s holy ground. There’s no greater investment.
Stephen Covey

The power to make and keep commitments to ourselves is the essence of developing the… habits of effectiveness.
Stephen Covey

If you start to think the problem is ‘out there’, stop yourself. That thought is the problem.
Stephen Covey

Did you ever consider how ridiculous it would be to try to cram on a farm – to forget to plan in spring, play all summer, and then cram in the fall to bring in the harvest?
Stephen Covey

The farm is a natural system. The price must be paid and the process followed. You always reap what you sow; there is no shortcut.
Stephen Covey

Interdependence is a choice only independent people can make.
Stephen Covey

You can’t talk your way out of problems you behave yourself into.
Stephen Covey

Our most constant relationships, like marriage, require our most constant deposits into the Emotional Bank Account.
Stephen Covey



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