Stephen Covey Quotes

Commonsense is the realised sense of proportion.

Learning lessons is a little like reaching maturity. You're not suddenly more happy, wealthy, or powerful, but you understand the world around you better, and you're at peace with yourself. Learning life's lessons is not about making your life perfect, but about seeing life as it was meant to be.

It seems the older you get, the more life comes into focus.

Getting older and having kids, you learn how to become less serious about it all.

At 40 years old you simply know what life is about.

Life is weird and complex but very simple at the same time. It's all about perception.

As I get older, I have a different look on life. I just try to be a little more tolerant and a little bit more centered about what's going on around me and not so emotional.

Life is sweet, but sometimes old people just don't get it.

A bit of perspective and life experience isn't a bad thing.

Answer the big question of eternity, and the little questions of life fall into perspective.

Age helps one to acquire some of the perspectives necessary to create harmony among apparent contradictions.

Oh, why does compassion weaken us?' It doesn't, really...Somewhere where it all balances out-don't the philosophers have a name for it, the perfect place, the place where the answers live?-if we could go there, you could see it doesn't.It only looks, a little bit, like it does, from here, like an ant at the foot of an oak tree. He doesn't have a clue that it's a tree; it's the beginning of the wall round the world, to him.

Things usually make sense in time, and even bad decisions have their own kind of correctness.

Wisedome hath one foot on Land, and another on Sea.

In a sense, knowledge shrinks as wisdom grows: for details are swallowed up in principles.

The Truth lies not in the Yes and not in the No, but in the knowledge and the beginning from which the Yes and the No arise.

When you've learned to laugh at the things that should be laughed at, and not to laugh at those that shouldn't, you've got wisdom and understanding. -Aunt Jimsie

Sometimes it is easier to see the light when you stand partly in the darkness.

Give me insight into today and you may have the antique and future worlds.

The best way to understand somebody else is to put yourself in his place.

The darker the subject, the more light you must try to shed on the matter. And vice versa.

Knowledge is silver. Outlook is gold. IQ is a lead weight.

He who grown aged in this world of woe, In deeds, not years, piercing the depths of life, So that no wonder waits him.

If you persist in trying to attain what is never attained (It is Tao's gift), if you persist in making effort to obtain what effort cannot get, if you persist in reasoning about what cannot be understood, you will be destroyed by the very thing you seek. To know when to stop, to know when you can get no further by your own action, this is the right beginning!

Literature, it seems to me, is wisdom.