The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

by Stephen R. Covey

Principles are deep, fundamental truths, classic truths, generic common denominators. They are tightly interwoven threads running with exactness, consistency, beauty, and strength through the fabric of life. Even in the midst of people or circumstances that seem to ignore the principles, we can be secure in the knowledge that principles are bigger than people or circumstances, and that thousands of years of history have seen them triumph, time and time again. Even more important, we can be secure in the knowledge that we can validate them in our

self-awareness, imagination, and conscience, it is the fourth human endowment—independent will—that really makes effective self-management possible.

Helen Kellers

You can’t be successful with other people if you haven’t paid the price of success with yourself.

“It is more noble to give yourself completely to one individual than to labor diligently for the salvation of the masses.”

balance of what I call courage and consideration.

A character rich in integrity, maturity, and the Abundance Mentality has a genuineness that goes far beyond technique, or lack of it, in human interaction.

Chariots of Fire

It is much more ennobling to the human spirit to let people judge themselves than to judge them.

“learner-controlled instruction.”

of principled negotiation is to separate the person from the problem, to focus on interests and not on positions, to invent options for mutual gain, and to insist on objective criteria—some external standard or principle that both parties can buy into.

Satisfied needs do not motivate. It’s only the unsatisfied need that motivates.

If you don’t have confidence in the diagnosis, you won’t have confidence in the prescription.

Seek first to understand is a correct principle evident in all areas of life. It’s a generic, common denominator principle, but it has its greatest power in the area of interpersonal relations.

We evaluate—we either agree or disagree; we probe—we ask questions from our own frame of reference; we advise—we give counsel based on our own experience; or we interpret—we try to figure people out, to explain their motives, their behavior, based on our own motives and behavior.

whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It means that the relationship which the parts have to each other is a part in and of itself.

“We seek not to imitate the masters, rather we seek what they sought,”

Buddhism calls this “the middle way.” Middle in this sense does not mean compromise; it means higher, like the apex of the triangle.

In the words of Phillips Brooks: Some day, in the years to come, you will be wrestling with the great temptation, or trembling under the great sorrow of your life. But the real struggle is here, now… Now it is being decided whether, in the day of your supreme sorrow or temptation, you shall miserably fail or gloriously conquer. Character cannot be made except by a steady, long continued process.