Stephen Covey Quotes

Until you are willing to accept total and complete responsibility for every aspect of your life, your life will keep sending you experiences designed to get your attention.

It takes half your life before you discover life is a do-it-yourself project.

If you accept that your only job is to be the keeper of your life force, you will make powerful choices.

Only I can change my life. No one can do it for me.

In the long run, we shape our lives, and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.

I champion the idea of being more conscious. I call it being an active architect of your own life. Building your life like an architect builds a structure.

Everybody has to know for themselves what they're capable of.

Everybody eventually discovers that they are an individual with the power to affect their own lives and make it better or not.

The knowledge that we are responsible for living the life we have is our most powerful tool.

As you age, you start to realize that your emotions are in your hands and not someone else's. Once you put them in someone else's hands, that's when you give them the power, and you can't change it. Only they can change it.

Don't forget, you are the hero of your own story.

You come to realize that only one person can tell you what's expected of you, and that's you.

What a man has made himself he will be; his state is the result of his past life, and his heaven or hell is in himself.

My most earnest prayer is that every man and every woman will get it into his or her heart that they are in very deed the architects of their lives.

I'm very interested in how we take ownership of our own stories and our own lives.

When I turned 30, I had this epiphany that my life is my own and my choices are my own.

One of the things I stress to those I meet, especially young people, is that we are the heroes of our own lives, and we can be the masters of our own stories.

If it is peace you want, seek to change yourself, not other people. It is easier to protect your feet with slippers than to carpet the whole of the earth.

Your legacy is being written by yourself. Make the right decisions.

Self-knowledge is the great power by which we comprehend and control our lives

You have choice. You can select joy over despair. You can select happiness over tears. You can select action over apathy. You can select growth over stagnation. You can select you. And you can select life. And it's time that people tell you you're not at the mercy of forces greater than yourself. You are, indeed, the greatest force for you.

Peak performance begins with your taking complete responsibility for your life and everything that happens to you.

We [people] have a teacher! The teacher is ourselves! We already know everything we need to know - our challenge is to discover that we know it. Turning to gurus, I think, we become guru-dependent, no different from drug-dependent, alcohol-dependent - needing an outside force to control our lives.

People do not change when you tell them they should; they change when they tell themselves they must.

Accept the consequences of your actions in order to become the agent of your mental, physical, spiritual and material success.