Inspiring Quotes
These are some of my favourite leadership quotes because they make me think again about what I thought I knew.
“Mental strength doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Confidence is based on competence. When self-belief is founded on accurate self-knowledge, it ceases to be an article of faith and becomes a matter of sound good judgement.” Ed Smith
“To manage fear keep a ruthlessly tight clamp on your imagination. With fear, you must prevent, not cure. Fear must not be let in in the first place. Think of anything but the subject of your fear.” Sir Ranulph Fiennes, Explorer
“Imagination is stronger than intellect in staving off tension.” Dr Janet Goodrich
“We take the very best of what people do, synthesise it down, make it learnable and share it with each other – and that is the real future of what NLP will be and its gonna stay that way!” Richard Bandler
“Strive for perfection in everything you do. Take the best that exists and make it better. When it does not exist, design it.” Sir Henry Royce
“Changing habits is not as difficult as breaking bad habits. Resistance is always hard. Therefore, especially with deeply ingrained bad habits, I recommend that you not try to break them. Simply leave them and start new ones.” Tim Gallwey, Inner Game
“Happiness is not something ready made. It comes from your own actions.” Dalai Lama
“The strongest human instinct is the need to look at the familiar.” Virginia Satir
“Let us be silent, that we may hear the whispers of the gods.” Ralph Waldo Emerson
“If I were asked to name the quality of character most valuable in a teacher, I should not say the unsparing willingness to serve others, admirable and essential as this is – but constant and unquenchable faith in human nature.” Jean Fort, Headmistress, Roedean school.
“Our achievements of today are but the sum total of our thoughts of yesterday. We are today where the thoughts of yesterday have brought us and we will be tomorrow where the thoughts of today take us.” Blaise Pascal
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” Aristotle
“To find God sit and smile.” Ketut Liyer
“The resting point of the mind is the heart.” Anon
“Know thyself.” The Oracle at Delphi
“Nothing in excess.” The Oracle at Delphi
“I dream for a living.” Steven Spielberg
“When you’ve practised that so long that you forget you’re practising, you work on making it smooooooth. You won’t have to worry about the last one – you get those three, and you’ll be fast.” Michael Randall Hickman, known as Caballo Blanco on long distance running & life.
“The spiritual life is a life beyond moods. It is a life in which we choose joy and do not allow ourselves to become victims of passing feelings of happiness or depression.” Henri Nouwen
“A customer is the most important visitor on our premises, he is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption in our work. He is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider in our business. He is part of it. We are not doing him a favor by serving him. He is doing us a favor by giving us an opportunity to do so.” Mahatma Gandhi
“Look for the good in every person and every situation. You’ll almost always find it.” Brian Tracy
“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
“The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.”
“Imagination is more important than knowledge.”
“A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.”
“Confusion of goals and perfection of means seems, in my opinion, to characterise our age.”
“Everything should be as simple as it is, but not simpler.”
“Force always attracts men of low morality.”
“God always takes the simplest way.”
“Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile.”
“Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value.” Albert Einstein
“Coaches who can outline plays on a black board are a dime a dozen. The ones who win get inside their player and motivate.”
“Confidence is contagious. So is lack of confidence.”
“The dictionary is the only place that ‘success’ comes before ‘work’. Hard work is the price we must pay for success. I think you can accomplish anything if you’re willing to pay the price.
“Fatigue makes cowards of us all.”
“I firmly believe that any man’s finest hour, the greatest fulfillment of all that he holds dear, is that moment when he has worked his heart out in a good cause and lies exhausted on the field of battle – victorious.”
“ If it doesn’t matter who wins or loses, then why do they keep score?”
“If you can accept losing, you can’t win.”
“Individual commitment to a group effort – that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.”
“It’s not whether you get knocked down, it’s whether you get up.”
“Leaders are made, they are not born. They are made by hard effort, which is the price which all of us must pay to achieve any goal that is worthwhile.”
“Teamwork is individual commitment to a group effort.” Vince Lombardi
“I always thought I was going to win.” Stephen Henry, 7-time world snooker champion
“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it’s time to pause and reflect.” Mark Twain
“Dig within. Within is the wellspring of Good; and it is always ready to bubble up, if you just dig.”
“A man’s life is what his thoughts make of it.” Marcus Aurelius
“A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.”
“One ought never to turn one’s back on a threatened danger and try to run away from it. If you do that, you will double the danger. But if you meet it promptly and without flinching, you will reduce the danger by half.”
“Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.”
“The price of greatness is responsibility.” Winston S. Churchill
“The minute that you understand that you can poke life…. if you push in, something will pop out the other side, that you can change life, you can mould it – that’s maybe the most important thing.”
“Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me … Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful… that’s what matters to me.”
“Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.”
“We made the buttons on the screen look so good you’ll want to lick them.”
“Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.”
“Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it.”
“That’s been one of my mantras — focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”
“The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world; are the ones who do.”
“Great things in business are never done by one person, they are done by a team of people.” Steve Jobs
“Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.” Dwight D. Eisenhower
“When you reach for the stars you may not quite get one, but you won’t come up with a handful of mud either.”
“To swear off making mistakes is very easy. All you have to do is swear off having ideas.”
“The sole purpose of business is service.”
“Keep it simple. Let’s do the obvious thing – the common thing – but let’s do it uncommonly well.”
“There’s a paradise of improvement waiting for us if we search hard enough for it.”
“It is apparent that the company can’t be any better or bigger than the growth of the people in it.”
“A company in which anyone is afraid to speak up, to differ, to be daring and original, is closing the coffin door on itself.”
“Advertising says to people, ‘here’s what we’ve got. Here’s what it will do for you. Here’s how to get it.’”
“Creative ideas flourish best in a shop which preserves some spirit of fun. Nobody is in business for fun, but that does not mean that there cannot be fun in business.”
“It seems axiomatic that you have to make a friend before you can effectively make him a proposition.”
“I have learned to practice what I call ‘constructive dissatisfaction.’”
“Steep yourself in your subject, work like hell, and love, honour and obey your hunches.”
“Plan ahead but maintain flexibility.” Leo Burnett
“Feedback in the breakfast of champions.” Anthony Robbins
“If you do not take charge of your mind other people and events will do it for you.” Duncan McColl
“Enthusiasm is like the mumps and the measles – it’s highly contagious.” Anon
“To succeed you have to believe in something with such a passion that it becomes a reality.” Anita Roddick
“It is never too late to be what you might have been.” George Elliott
“Death seeks the hands that have nothing to do.” Chinese Proverb about old age
“Some people say it is wrong to regard life as a game; I don’t think so. Life to me means the greatest of all games. The danger lies in treating it as a trivial game, a game to be taken lightly, and a game in which the rules don’t matter much. The rules matter a great deal. The game has to be played fairly, or it is no game at all. And even to win the game is not the chief end. The chief end is to win it honourably and splendidly. To this chief end several things are necessary. Loyalty is one. Discipline is another. Unselfishness is another. Courage is another. Optimism is another. And Chivalry is another.” Sir Ernest Shackleton, Explorer. Family motto: “By endurance we conquer”.
“I am able to control only that of which I am aware. That of which I am unaware controls me. Awareness empowers me.” Sir John Whitmore
“If you have a hard decision, I respectfully suggest that it is because you have not done sufficient creative thinking … How can you make the best decision if you haven’t got the best option?” Bob Galvin, former CEO of Motorola
