Thoughts by Stephen Covey from Daily Inspiration

Thoughts by Stephen Covey

May you find inspiration in these thoughts and quotes by Stephen Covey from my large Daily Inspiration library of inspiring quotes and inspirational words.

The nature of life is to be
a study of contrasts: joy/sadness, full/empty.
The Main Thing is to Keep The Main Thing The Main Thing.
- Stephen Covey

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Thank You,
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

How different our lives are when we
really know what is deeply important to us,
and keeping that picture in mind,
we manage ourselves each day
to be and to do what really matters most
- Stephen Covey

O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console;
to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive;
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
- St. Francis of Assisi

Don't seek God in temples.
He is close to you.
He is within you.
Only you should surrender to Him
and you will rise above happiness and unhappiness.
- Leo Tolstoy

Your task is not to seek for love,
but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself
that you have built against it.
- A Course In Miracles (commonly misattributed to Rumi)

The Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace,
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
where there is sadness, joy.
O Divine Master,
grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;
to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive;
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
- although attributed to St. Francis of Assisi,
this prayer first appeared (written in French) in 1912

What we seek we shall find; what we flee from flees from us.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

All your anxiety is because of your desire for harmony.
Seek disharmony, then you will gain peace.
- Rumi

We seek opinions that are likely to
support what we want to be true.
- Thomas Gilovich

The essence of being human is that one
does not seek perfection.
- George Orwell

We travel, some of us forever, to seek
other states, other lives, other souls.
- Anais Nin

Do not seek to bring things to pass
in accordance with your wishes,
but wish for them as they are,
and you will find them.
- Epictetus

We live in a wonderful world that is
full of beauty, charm and adventure.
There is no end to the adventures that we can have
if only we seek them with our eyes open.
- Jawaharlal Nehru

While the laughter of joy is in
full harmony with our deeper life,
the laughter of amusement
should be kept apart from it.
The danger is too great of thus learning
to look at solemn things in a spirit of mockery,
and to seek in them opportunities for exercising wit.
- Lewis Carroll

Seek always to do some good, somewhere.
Every man has to seek in his own way to realize his true worth.
You must give some time to your fellow man.
For remember, you don't live in a world all your own.
Your brothers are here too.
- Albert Schweitzer

Formulate and stamp indelibly on your mind
a mental picture of yourself as succeeding.
Hold this picture tenaciously. Never permit it to fade.
Your mind will seek to develop the picture...
Do not build up obstacles in your imagination.
- Norman Vincent Peale

What each must seek in his life never was on land or sea.
It is something out of his own unique potentiality for experience,
something that never has been and never could
have been experienced by anyone else.
- Joseph Campbell

To love. To be loved.
To never forget your own insignificance.
To never get used to the unspeakable violence
and the vulgar disparity of life around you.
To seek joy in the saddest places.
To pursue beauty to its lair.
To never simplify what is complicated
or complicate what is simple.
To respect strength, never power.
Above all, to watch. To try to understand.
To never look away. And never, never, to forget.
- Arundhati Roy

We fear the unknown,
perhaps more than we fear anything else,
and yet we are, at heart, adventurers.
We seek to expand our realm of knowledge and dominion.
Perhaps we are attempting to overcome and crush the unknown,
but our duel with the unknown is such a one-sided clash
that we must know in our hearts
that our adventure is no more than a child's game.
Perhaps we hope that the unknown
is like the darkness of a cave
and that the brief light of our adventurer's candle
can illuminate the entire cave.
Nonetheless, the path of the adventurer
is a path of joy, while the way of fear is one of suffering.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

Once you have seen the truth
you must make the decision to let go
of the pain, anger, and resentment you have been holding on to.
This requires you to take action.
If you are attached to your pain, resentment,
and self-righteousness, and addicted to your emotional reactions,
this will be a difficult step for you.
Taking action requires letting go of the very thing
you have been holding on to for so many years.
There is comfort in what we find familiar,
even if we are experiencing pain and suffering.
The pain and suffering itself becomes the familiarity we seek.
It takes absolute faith in yourself
plus courage, will, and discipline to let go.
But once you let go, it will be as if
the weight of the world has been taken off your shoulders.
In this process it is important to forgive
not just the others in our lives, but also ourselves.
For most people, giving ourselves
the gift of forgiveness is very challenging.
- Sheri Rosenthal

Do not seek the because -
in love there is no because,
no reason, no explanation, no solutions.
- Anais Nin

Nothing I say can explain to you Divine Love
Yet all of creation cannot seem to stop talking about it.
- Rumi

The Divine Plan is one of Freedom.
The inherent nature of man is ever seeking
to express itself in terms of freedom,
because freedom is the birthright of every living soul.
- Ernest Holmes

Each and every human being on Earth
has both the responsibility and the privilege
of viewing themselves as Divine beings
with the power to bring about peace.
- James Twyman

It takes discipline and compassion
to awaken the divine in ourselves long enough
to recognize the divine in another.
- Mary Anne Radmacher

In all of his bestsellers, the Divine has told the truth,
custom-tailored to the comprehension of the times.
- Ernest Holmes

The more a man can forget, the greater the number
of metamorphoses which his life can undergo,
the more he can remember, the more divine his life becomes.
- Soren Kierkegaard

I view the Divine and All of Life
from the perspective of Celebration.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

The most I can do for my friend is simply to be his friend.
I have no wealth to bestow on him.
If he knows that I am happy in loving him, he will want no other reward.
Is not friendship divine in this?
- Henry David Thoreau

Just one quality of the Buddha has to be remembered.
He consists only of one quality: witnessing.
This small word witnessing contains the whole of spirituality.
Witness that you are not the body.
Witness that you are not the mind.
Witness that you are only a witness.
As the witnessing deepens,
you start becoming drunk with the divine.
That is what is called ecstasy.
- Osho

Believe nothing, no matter where you read it,
or who said it, no matter if I have said it,
unless it agrees with your own reason
and your own common sense.
- The Buddha

There are only two ways to live your life.
One is as though nothing is a miracle.
The other is as though everything is a miracle.
- Albert Einstein

I say NO to the demands of the world.
I say YES to the longings of my own heart.
There is nothing I ever need to have.
There is nothing I ever need to do.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

Fully experience THIS moment -
breathe in, breathe out - nothing more.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

The only thing necessary for evil to triumph
is for enough good men to do nothing.
- Edmund Burke

Trust in the Light.
Darkness is not a force -
it is merely the absence of light.
Observe that when a light is brought to a dark place,
the darkness disappears.
Sadness is similar -
when joy is brought to suffering,
the sadness disappears.
Open yourself to the Light!
Hold back nothing,
Trust in the Light.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

Don't Take Anything Personally.
Nothing others do is because of you.
- Miguel Angel Ruiz (don Miguel Ruiz)

Death is nothing else but going home to God,
the bond of love will be unbroken for all eternity.
- Mother Teresa

Don't underestimate the value of Doing Nothing,
of just going along,
listening to all the things you can't hear,
and not bothering.
- A. A. Milne (Winnie-The-Pooh)

It is my desire, in the office of a Christian minister,
to do nothing which I cannot do with my whole heart.
Having said this, I have said all.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

God creates out of nothing. Wonderful you say.
Yes, to be sure, but he does what is still more wonderful:
he makes saints out of sinners.
- Soren Kierkegaard

There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you
it's going to be a butterfly.
- R. Buckminster Fuller

The great gift of Easter is hope -
Christian hope which makes us have that confidence in God,
in his ultimate triumph, and in his goodness and love,
which nothing can shake.
- Basil C. Hume

There is nothing that wastes the body like worry,
and one who has any faith in God
should be ashamed to worry about anything whatsoever.
- Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi

Choose Inner Peace.
Nothing is worth losing your inner peace.
Take action as circumstances require,
but never surrender your inner peace.
Stop. Breathe deeply.
Close your eyes and breathe deeply again.
Then, and only then, take action -
from a peaceful heart.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

Our ordinary mind always tries to persuade us
that we are nothing but acorns
and that our greatest happiness will be
to become bigger, fatter, shinier acorns;
but that is of interest only to pigs.
Our faith gives us knowledge of something better:
that we can become oak trees.
- E. F. Schumacher

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May the world be kind to you,
and may your own thoughts be gentle upon yourself.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

Thoughts by Stephen Covey

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