Quotes from Stephen Covey

Define a habit as the intersection of knowledge, skill, and desire.

Look to yourself. Be honest with yourself first—the roots of your problems are spiritual, and so are the root solutions. Build your character and your relationships on the bedrock of principles.

By making and keeping promises to ourselves and others, little by little, our honor becomes greater than our moods. The

Dr. Frankl hypothesized that we have three parts to our nature: our body, our mind, and our spirit. But his deepest conviction is that most—not all—diseases originate in the spirit. That is, in a sense of meaninglessness, a sense of hollowness, a sense of purposelessness. No mission. No vision. No future.

To relate effectively with a wife, a husband, children, friends, or working associates, we must learn to listen. And this requires emotional strength. Listening involves patience, openness, and the desire to understand—highly developed qualities of character. It's so much easier to operate from a low emotional level and to give high-level advice. Our level of development is fairly obvious with tennis or piano playing, where it is impossible to pretend.

You can buy a person's hand, but you can't buy his heart. His heart is where his enthusiasm, his loyalty is. You can buy his back, but you can't buy his brain. That's where his creativity is, his ingenuity, his resourcefulness.

But to take the child alone, quietly, when the relationship is good and to discuss the teaching or the value seems to have much greater impact.

Too much focus on PC is like a person who runs three or four hours a day, bragging about the extra ten years of life it creates, unaware he's spending them running.

Whether you are a mailman, a hairdresser, an insurance salesman, a housewife—whatever. As long as you feel you are serving others, you do the job well. When you are concerned only with helping yourself, you do it less well—a law as inexorable as gravity.

Whatever you can do, or dream, begin it! For boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now. Dream no little dreams.

If you carefully consider what you wanted to be said of you in the funeral experience, you will find your definition of success. It

Borrowing strength builds weakness. It builds weakness in the borrower because it reinforces dependence on external factors to get things done. It builds weakness in the person forced to acquiesce, stunting the development of independent reasoning, growth, and internal discipline. And finally, it builds weakness in the relationship. Fear replaces cooperation, and both people involved become more arbitrary and defensive.