Inspirational Quotes

Tell me and I will forget. Show me, and I may remember. Involve me & I will understand.

Confucius

You don’t build it for yourself. You know what people wantand you build it for them.

Walt Disney

The soul seeks to belong, to create relationships, and to be part of a community. In seeking to inspire greatness in organizations…, creating communities to which we all contribute and from which we are all nourished – a holistic, symbiotic relationship built on acceptance and permission among members that leads to more than just survival – it leads to growth and evolution.

Lance SecretanINSPIRE! What Great Leaders Do

Success is loving life and daring to live it.

Maya Angelou

Great discoveries and improvements invariably involve the cooperation of many minds. I may be given credit for having blazed the trail but when I look at the subsequent developments, I feel the credit is due to others rather than to myself.

Alexander Graham Bell

People have to feel needed. Frequently, we just offer a job and 'perks.' We don't always offer people a purpose. When people feel there is a purpose and that they're needed, there's not much else to do except let them do the work.

Maya Angelou

The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but rather a fire to be ignited.

Plutarch

I want a cultural change, I want to contribute to a work of art in the domain of human existence, I want to contribute to evoke a manner of coexistence in which love, mutual respect, honesty and social responsibility arise spontaneously from living instant after instant.

Humberto Maturana

Great minds must be ready not only to take opportunities, but to make them.

C.C. Colten

Learning and innovation go hand in hand. The arrogance of success is to think that what you did yesterday will be sufficient for tomorrow.

William Pollard

One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar.

Helen Keller

Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there.

Arthur Godrey

Leaders need to cultivate debate and simultaneously build consensus.

Michael Roberto

Why Great Leaders Don’t Take YES for an Answer

The future won’t just happen, it will be created. And if we get involved, our values, aspirations, and growing expectations will shape and drive the transformation of the world.

Don Tapscott

If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything; it is open to everything. In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s, there are few.

Shunryu Suzuki

The important thing is not to stop questioning.

Albert Einstein

In everyone’s life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit.

Albert Schweitzer from Inspire! What Great Leaders Do, Lance Secretan

The servant-leader is servant first… It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first…The difference manifest itself in the care taken by the servant-first to make sure that other people’s highest priority needs are being served. The best test, and difficult to administer , is: do those served grow as persons; do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants?

Robert Greenleaf

…imagine a world where everyone was constantly learning, a world where what you wondered was more interesting than what you knew, and curiosity counted for more than certain knowledge. Imagine a world where what you gave away was more valuable than what you held back, where joy was not a dirty word, where play was not forbidden after your

eleventh birthday. cluetrain manifesto, 2000

Out of intense complexities, intense simplicities emerge.

Winston Churchill

The highest-risk leader is the one who thinks she works alone.

Max DePree, Leadership Jazz

You must be the change you wish to see.

Mahatma Gandhi

If we succeed in maintaining focus, rather than control, we also create the flexibility and responsiveness that every organization craves.

Margaret Wheatley

It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.

Seneca

Life’s most urgent question is, ‘what are you doing for others’.

Martin Luther King Jr.

A mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists.

Charles Dickens

The radical, committed to human liberation, does not become the prisoner of a circle of certainty within which reality is also imprisoned. On the contrary, the more radical the person is, the more fully he or she entersinto reality so that, knowing it better,he or she can better transform it.

Paulo Freire

It is the organization’s responsibility to provide purpose if they want to retain good people - if you want to retain talent, you’ve got to create cause.Otherwise, you get a relationship in which “I am working for you purely because I’m earning money”. Then you get very short-term thinking, very selfish thinking.

Charles Handy

You think that because you understand ONE you understand TWO, because one and one makes two.

But you must also understand AND.

Sufi Proverb

I learned that if you’re a leader and you’re not sick and tired ofcommunicating, you probably aren’t doing a good enough job.

Max DePree

Coming together is a beginning; keeping together is progress; working together is success.

Henry Ford

You cannot mandate productivity, you must provide the tools to let people become their best.

Steve Jobs

Some day, after we have mastered the winds, the waves, the tides, and gravity…we shall harness… the energies of love. Then, for the second time in the history of the world, people will have discovered fire!

Teilhard de Chardin

There is no power for change greater than a community discovering what it cares about.

Margaret Wheatley

The things that make good headlines attract our attention because they are on the surface of the stream of life, and they distract our attention from the slower, impalpable, imponderable movements that work below the surface and penetrate to the depths. But of course it is really these deeper, slower movements that, in the end, make history, and it is they that stand out huge in retrospect, when the sensational passing events have dwindled,

in perspective, to their true proportions. Arnold Toynbee

If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.

Albert Einstein

Those who profess freedom and depreciate agitation are those who want crops without plowing up the ground...

Frederick Douglas

It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.

Henri David Thoreau

When embarking on an organizational change:

One person will get clobbered. Two will commiserate. Three is a full-fledged conspiracy. Four people is a revolution!

Jen Hunter (paraphrasing Peter Senge), AND Susan Englehutt misquoting Jen Hunter paraphrasing Peter Senge

Knowledge is experience, everything else is just information.

Albert Einstein

Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.

Albert Szent-Gyorgyl

All thinking and learning takes place in a context. The mind always seeks context in order to create meaning.

Ed Clarke

By becoming aware that we are communities, not organizations, we change the very nature of our relationships, making them less material and more spiritual, less mechanical and more divine, less temporary and more infinite, less cursory and more vital. Then our communities will come alive.

Lance Secretan

Curiosity is one of the most permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous mind.

Samuel Johnson

The world is but a canvas to our imaginations.

Henry Thoreau

A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

The best way to get a good idea is to get a lot of ideas.

Linus Pauling

There are no foolish questions and no man becomes a fool until he has stopped asking questions.

Saul Steinberg

It is easier to tone down a wild idea than to think up a new one.

Alex Osborne

The ultimate solutions to problems are rational; the process of finding them is not.

W. Gordon

People are disturbed, not by things, but by the views they take of them.

Epictetus

You have to find something that you love enough to be able to take risks, jump over the hurdles, and break through the brick walls that are always going to be placed in front of you. If you don’t have that kind of feeling for what it is you’re doing, you’ll stop at the first giant hurdle.

George Lucasfrom Cynthia Kersey’s Unstoppable

To ask the hard question is simple.

W.H. Auden

Imagination is more important than knowledge. For while knowledge defines all we currently know and understand, imagination points to all we might yet discovered and create.

Albert Einstein

The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists.

Charles Dickens

Never tell people HOW to do things. Tell them WHAT to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity. General George S. Patton

Imagination is the living power and prime agent of all human perception.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

One sees great things from the valley, only small things from the peak.

G.K. Chesteron

If we value differences, we have to learn to listen to voices different from our own. Any kind of prejudgment or shutting down communications is going to get in the way of a team of people attempting to create something special together. Michele Hunt

The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook

Everyone has his own specific vocation in life... Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated. Thus, everyone’s task is as unique as is his specific opportunity to implement it. Viktor Frankl

from Cynthia Kersey’s Unstoppable

The ultimate glue that binds people is not what they get from the organization but what they can contribute to the community.

Peter Senge

The best leaders, like the best music, inspire us to see new possibilities.

Max DePree, Leadership Jazz

Effective leaders put words to the formless longings and deeply felt needs of others.

Warren Bennis

Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.

Goethe

And nothing is less productive than to make more efficient what should not be done at all.

Peter Drucker

We serve when we build capability in others by supporting ownership and choice at every level.

Peter Block

We hunger for community and are a great deal more productive when we find it.

Marvin Weisbord

Every job is a self-portrait of the person who did the job. Autograph your work with excellence.

Unknown

I need to know that you care before I care to know what you know.

James Autry

First Ponder, Then Dare.

Helmuth Moltke

If you want to move people, it has to be toward a vision that's positive for them, that taps important values, that gets them something they desire, and it has to be presented in a compelling way that they feel inspired to follow.

Martin Luther King Jr.

The future is a collective effort. You can’t decide on the future alone, and you especially can’t create it alone…We’d all be better off facing the future together, collaborating in the light of day. We’re all in the future together.

Faith Popcorn, The Popcorn Report