“Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.”
– Hellen Kellar
Quotes to Inspire
These quotes were selected for our friends and organizational leaders who are often asked to deliver greetings or write articles. Hopefully these inspirational words will help you in your service to others. If you find a quote that resonates with you, write it down and keep it near. We all need to be our own strongest cheerleaders on our leadership journey.
“A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives.”
– Jackie Robinson
“Do what you feel called to do, but also be prepared to accept that you don’t necessarily know what you’re going to learn. Be willing to be surprised by forces beyond your control, and realize that a major learning on the journey is the art of surrender.”
– M. Scott Peck
“We all live in suspense, from day to day, from hour to hour; in other words, we are the hero of our own story.”
– Mary McCarthy
“Perhaps the central task of the leader of leaders thus becomes the development of other leaders.”
– Warren Bennis
“Popularity is when other people like you. Happiness is when you like yourself.”
– Mike Murdock
“When you cease to make a contribution you begin to die.”
– Eleanor Roosevelt
“Be the change you want to see in the world.”
– Gandhi
“The only person over whom you have direct and immediate control is yourself. The most important assets to develop, preserve, and enhance, therefore, are your own capabilities. And no one can do it for you – you must cultivate the habits of leadership effectiveness yourself – and doing so will be the single most important investment you’ll ever make. “
– Stephen Covey
“We may have all come on different ships, but we’re in the same boat now.”
– Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Start a crusade in your life to be your best.”
– William Danforth
“You never achieve real success unless you like what you’re doing.”
– Dale Carnegie
“Love is not like a buffet line where the person in front of you threatens to take too much and leave too little for you. Love is like a muscle; the more it is exercised today, the more it can be used tomorrow.”
– Harold Kushner
“If you judge people, you have no time to love them.”
– Mother Teresa
“It’s easy to make a buck. It’s a lot tougher to make a difference.”
– Tom Brokaw
“They may forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel.”
– Carl Buechner
“My country is the world, and my religion is to do good.”
– Thomas Paine
“We all live under the same sky, but we don’t all have the same horizon.”
– Konrad Adenauer
“We don’t receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.”
– Marcel Proust
“Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”
– Thomas A. Edison
“Why assume that to look is to see?”
– Pablo Picasso
“If you think you can do a thing, or think you can’t do a thing; you’re right.”
– Henry Ford
“There is no music in a “rest” that I know of, but there’s the making of music in it. And people are always missing that part of the life melody.”
– John Ruskin
“What one does is what counts and not what one had the intention of doing.”
– Pablo Picasso
“Do not wait for leaders; do it alone, person to person.”
– Mother Teresa
“For of those to whom much is given, much is required.”
– John F. Kennedy
“There’s harmony and inner peace to be found in following a moral compass that points in the same direction, regardless of fashion or trend.”
– Ted Koppel
“We could never learn to be brave and patient if there were only joy in the world. “
– Helen Keller
“It’s how well you do something not what you do that makes you a professional.”
– Dennis Mannering
“Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do. “
– John Wooden
“Be like a postage stamp. Its usefulness lies in its ability to stick to one thing until it gets there.”
– Joseph Billings
“A positive attitude removes the rust from the mind, lubricates our inward machinery, and enables us to do our work with fewer creaks and groans.”
– Unknown
“As leaders, we’re giving out grades in every encounter we have with people. We can choose to give out grades as an expectation to live up to, and then we can reassess them according to performance. Or we can offer grades as a possibility to live into. The second approach is much more powerful. “
– Benjamin Zander
“The earth does not belong to man. Man belongs to earth. Man did not weave the web of life. He is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.”
– Chief Seattle
“Information is power only if you can take action with it. Then, and only then, does it represent knowledge and, consequently, power.”
– Daniel Burrus
“The illiterate of the future are not those who can’t read or write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”
– Alvin Toffler
“Be not afraid of growing slowly; be afraid only of standing still.”
– Chinese proverb
“The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.”
– Helen Keller
“Live as if everything you do will eventually be known.”
– Hugh Prather
“The biggest disease today is not leprosy or tuberculosis, but rather the feeling of being unwanted.”
– Mother Teresa
“People, for the sake of getting a living, forget to live.”
– Margaret Fuller
“You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face . . . you must do the thing you think you cannot.”
– Eleanor Roosevelt
“What the leader does is the single most important factor in demonstrating to others what is acceptable – and unacceptable – behavior in our organizations.”
– James Kouzer
“Be more concerned with your character than with your reputation. Your character is what you really are while your reputation is merely what others think you are.”
– John Wooden
“As we look ahead into the next century, leaders will be those who empower others.”
– Bill Gates
“All feelings are acceptable, but all behavior isn’t.”
– Mary Pipher
“The shortest and surest way to live with honor in this world is to be in reality what we appear to be.”
– Socrates
“When the leader strives, the team will grow.”
– Albert Yu
“Men build too many walls and not enough bridges.”
– Sir Isaac Newton
“It is always important to have something yet to do in life.”
– Viktor Frankl
“Remember always that you have not only the right to be an individual, you have an obligation to be one.”
– Eleanor Roosevelt
“I am part of all that I have met.”
– Alfred Tennyson
“The final forming of a person’s character lies in their own hands.”
– Anne Frank
“The last of human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
– Viktor Frankl
“Die when I may, I want it said of me by those who knew me best, that I always plucked a thistle and planted a flower where I thought a flower would grow.”
– Abraham Lincoln
“Service is the rent we pay for being. It is the very purpose of life and not something you do in your spare time.”
– Marian Wright Edelman
“One man practicing sportsmanship is far better than a hundred teaching it.”
– Knute Rockne
“We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects.”
– Herman Melville
“Plan your work for today and every day, then work your plan.”
– Norman Vincent Peale
“The quality of an individual is reflected in the standards they set for themselves.”
– Ray Kroc
“I think that education is power. I think that being able to communicate with people is power. One of my main goals on the planet is to encourage people to empower themselves.”
– Oprah Winfrey
“Example is not the main thing in influencing others, it is the only thing.”
– Albert Schweitzer
“Diversity without unity makes about as much sense as dishing up flour, sugar, water, eggs, shortening, and baking powder on a plate and calling it a cake.”
– William Pollard
“People take different roads seeking fulfillment and happiness. Just because they’re not on your road doesn’t mean they’ve gotten lost.”
– Jackson Browne
“There is no separation. We are all from the same place. As long as there is respect and acknowledgement of connections, things continue working. When that stops we all die. “
– Joy Harjo