jes > jes's Quotes

“The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.”
― Mark Twain

“Keep in mind the words of Sir Winston Churchill: 'Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet Power: The Secret Strengths of Introverts

“There is no real excellence in all this world which can be separated from right living.”
― David Starr Jordan

“In a gentle way, you can shake the world.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“Dominance, even the threat of it, is a form of dehumanization. It’s the ugliest kind of power.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“There’s a power in allowing yourself to be known and heard, in owning your unique story, in using your authentic voice. And there’s a grace in being willing to know and hear others. This, for me, is how we become.”
― Michelle Obama

“So many of us go through life with our stories hidden, feeling ashamed or afraid when our whole truth doesn't live up to some established ideal. We grow up with messages that tell us there's only one way to be American -- that if our skin is dark or our hips are too wide, if we don't experience love in a particular way, if we speak another language or come from a different country, then we don't belong. That is, until someone dares to start telling that story differently. (From Becoming, 2018)”
― Michelle Obama

“Becoming requires equal parts patience and rigor. Becoming is never giving up on the idea that there’s more growing to be done.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“It is character that communicates most eloquently.”
― Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change

“It hurts to live after someone has died. It just does. It can hurt to walk down a hallway or open the fridge. It hurts to put on a pair of socks, to brush your teeth. Food tastes like nothing. Colors go flat. Music hurts, and so do memories. You look at something you’d otherwise find beautiful—a purple sky at sunset or a playground full of kids—and it only somehow deepens the loss. Grief is so lonely this way.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“What you are shouts so loudly in my ears I cannot hear what you say.”
― Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

“Now I think it’s one of the most useless questions an adult can ask a child—What do you want to be when you grow up? As if growing up is finite. As if at some point you become something and that’s the end.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“I’ve been held up as the most powerful woman in the world and taken down as an “angry black woman.” I’ve wanted to ask my detractors which part of that phrase matters to them the most—is it “angry” or “black” or “woman”?”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“I take as my guide the hope of a saint: in crucial things, unity-
in important things, diversity-
in all things, generosity.”
― George Bush

“Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.”
― Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change

“Principles are the territory. Values are maps. When we value correct principles, we have truth -- a knowledge of things as they are.”
― Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change

“One person’s mission is another person’s minutiae.”
― Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

“Treat them all the same by treating them differently.”
― Stephen Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change

“The most important ingredient we put into any relationship is not what we say or what we do, but what we are.”
― Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change

“My experience has been that there are times to teach and times not to teach. When relationships are strained and the air charged with emotion, an attempt to teach is often perceived as a form of judgment and rejection.”
― Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change

“You can’t be successful with other people if you haven’t paid the price of success with yourself.”
― Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change

“Admission of ignorance is often the first step in our education. Thoreau taught, “How can we remember our ignorance, which our growth requires, when we are using our knowledge all the time?”
― Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change

“Many people seem to think that success in one area can compensate for failure in other areas of life.”
― Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change

“Integrity in an interdependent reality is simply this: you treat everyone by the same set of principles.”
― Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

“Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them.”
― Albert Einstein

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
― Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers

“Interdependence is a choice only independent people can make”
― Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change

“No one can persuade another to change. Each of us guards a gate of change that can only be opened from the inside. We cannot open the gate of another, either by argument or by emotional appeal.”
― Marilyn Ferguson

“Our behavior is a function of our decisions, not our conditions.”
― Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change