Great Throughts Treasury

"Wisdom is your perspective on life, your sense of balance."

"With people if you want to save time, don?t be efficient. With people, slow is fast and fast is slow."

"Words are like eggs dropped from great heights. You could no more call them back then ignore the mess they left when they fell."

"With the dizzying rate of change in technology and increasing competition driven by the globalization of markets and technology, we must not only be educated, we must constantly re-educate and reinvent ourselves."

"Writing is another powerful way to sharpen the mental saw. Keeping a journal of our thoughts, experiences, insights, and learnings promotes mental clarity, exactness, and context."

"Writing distills, crystallizes, and clarifies thought."

"Yet all of the enduring major religious traditions of the world are unified when it comes to basic underlying principles? principles like respect, honesty, kindness, integrity, service and fairness? To expand, a principle is a natural law like gravity. It?s different than a value. Values are subjective; principles are objective. Gravity? if you drop something, gravity controls it. If I don?t tell you the truth, you won?t trust me ? that?s a natural law? even though values control behavior, principles control the consequences of behavior."

"You always reap what you sow; there is no shortcut."

"You can buy their backs, but you can?t buy their brains."

"You are not your habits. You can replace old?with new."

"You begin with the end in mind."

"You can buy a person?s hand, but you can?t buy his heart. His heart is where his enthusiasm, his loyalty is. You can buy his back, but you can?t buy his brain. That?s where his creativity is, his ingenuity, his resourcefulness. PC work is treating employees as volunteers just as you treat customers as volunteers, because that?s what they are. They volunteer the best part?their hearts and minds."

"You can decide within yourself how circumstances will affect you."

"You can?t be successful with other people if you haven?t paid the price of success with yourself."

"You can?t talk your way out of what you?ve behaved yourself into."

"You can retire from a job, but don?t ever retire from making extremely meaningful contributions in life."

"You cannot play with the animal in you without becoming wholly animal, play with falsehood without forfeiting your right to truth, play with cruelty without losing your sensitivity of mind. He who wants to keep his garden tidy doesn?t reserve a plot for weeds."

"You can?t talk your way out of a problem you behaved your way into!"

"You cannot hold people responsible for the results if you supervise their methods."

"You see your competition as a learning source, as friends who can keep you sharp and teach you where your weaknesses are."

"You understand the purpose of a personal mission statement. It is the picture of where you want to end up?that is, your destination is the values you want to live your life by. Even if you are off course much or most of the time but still hang on to your sense of hope and your vision, you will eventually arrive at your destination. You will arrive at your destination and usually on time. That?s the whole point?we just get back on course. This idea?this principle?of beginning with the end in mind is based upon the concept that all things are created twice: first in the mind, as a thought or intellectual creation; and second in reality as a physical creation. The mental creation, the flight plan, brings forth the hope in the flight. Norman Cousins taught, The capacity for hope is the most significant fact of life. It gives human beings a sense of destination and the energy to get started. At the beginning of this process you will find enormous hope and encouragement as well as fun and happiness in developing a mission statement. It?s truly an enjoyable process. It?s also a leadership process. But here?s something to think about carefully."

"You will always be a victim until you forgive."

"You have to decide what your highest priorities are and have the courage?pleasantly, smilingly, non-apologetically, to say ?no? to other things. And the way you do that is by having a bigger ?yes? burning inside. The enemy of the ?best? is often the ?good.?"

"You have to leave the comfort zone of the base camp and confront an entirely new and unknown wilderness."

"You can't live principals you can't understand."

"You can't change the fruit without changing the root."

"You have to water the flowers you want to grow."

"You learn best when you teach another."

"You never ?retire? from the family."

"You're not a product of your nature. That is your genetic makeup or your nurture, the things that have happened to you. Of course those things affect you powerfully, but they do not determine you."

"Your planning tool should be your servant, never your master."

"Your most important work is always ahead of you, never behind you."