Quotes to inspire you toward becoming a gifted leader!

Giftedness, Core Values & Purpose:

• "Life is a place of service.  Joy can be real only if people look upon their life as a service and have a definite object in life outside themselves and their personal happiness." - Leo Tolstoy
    
• "Too many people overvalue what they are not and undervalue what they are." - Malcolm Forbes
    
• "Life is good when you live from your roots.  Your values are a critical source of energy, enthusiasm, and direction.  Work is meaningful and fun when it's an expression of your true core." - Shoshana Zuboff
    
• "Try to forget yourself in the service of others.  For when we think too much of ourselves and our own interests, we easily become despondent.  But when we work for others, our efforts return to bless us." - Sidney Powell
    
• "When a man realizes his littleness, his greatness can appear." - H. G. Wells
    
• "A meaningful life will not be found in the next job or the next car.  The way you get meaning in your life is to devote your self to helping others and creating something that gives you purpose." - Morrie Schwartz, in "Tuesdays with Morrie" by Mitch Albom
    
• "The only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work.  And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.  If you haven't found it yet, keep looking." - Steve Jobs
    
• "When you ask people what it is like being part of a great team, what is most striking is the meaningfulness of the experience.  People talk about being part of something larger than themselves, of being connected, of being generative.  It becomes quite clear that, for many, their experiences as part of truly great teams stand out as singular periods of life lived to the fullest." - Peter Senge
    
• "How does one become a butterfly?  You must want to fly so much that you are willing to give up being a caterpillar." - Trina Pallus
    
• "However mean your life is, meet it and live it: do not shun it and call it hard names.  Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage.  Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends.  Things do not change; we change.  Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts." - Henry David Thoreau
    
• "Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it.  Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it." -  Goethe

Servant & Transformational Leadership:

• "It is amazing how much people can get done if they do not worry about who gets the credit." - Sandra Swinney
    
• "If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more, and become more, you are a leader." - John Quincy Adams
    
• "Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win great triumphs, even though checked by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat." - Theodore Roosevelt
    
• "Leadership is lifting a person's vision to higher sights, the raising of a person's performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations." - Peter Drucker
    
• "In the end, it is important to remember that we cannot become what we need to be by remaining what we are." - Max DePree
    
• "We are not looking for blind obedience.  We are looking for people who, on their own initiative, want to be doing what they are doing because they consider it a worthy objective.  I have always believed that the best leader is the best server.  And if you're a servant, by definition, you're not controlling." - Herb Kelleher
    
• "It could be argued that all leadership is appreciative leadership.  It's the capacity to see the best in the world around us, in our colleagues, and in the groups we are trying to lead.  It's the capacity to see the most creative and improbable opportunities in the marketplace.  It's the capacity to see with an appreciative eye the true and the good, the better, and the possible." - David L. Cooperrider
    
• "Leadership is not so much about technique and methods as it is about opening the heart.  Leadership is about inspiration - of oneself and of others.  Great leadership is about human experiences, not processes.  Leadership is not a formula or a program, it is a human activity that comes from the heart and considers the hearts of others.  It is an attitude, not a routine." -  Lance Secretan
    
• "If you're the leader, you've got to give up your omniscient and omnipotent fantasies - that you know and must do everything.  Learn how to abandon your ego to the talents of others." - Warren Bennis

Emotional Intelligence & Employee Engagement
(Balancing Head & Heart):

• "He who has learning without imagination has feet but no wings." - Stanley Goldstein
    
• "When people are made to feel secure and important and appreciated, it will no longer be necessary for them to whittle down others in order to seem bigger in comparison." - Virginia Arcastle
    
• "The development of people is an equal partner with the actual results of your organization's purpose" - Ken Blanchard
   
• "The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little." - Franklin D. Roosevelt
    
• "The axe forgets, the tree remembers." - Anonymous
    
• "My day is better when I give people a bit of my heart rather than a piece of my mind." -  Pam Conley
    
• "A special workplace has many ingredients.  The feeling that you are part of a team, a sense of community, the knowledge that what you do has real purpose - all these things help to make work fun.  But by far the most important factor is whether people are able to use their individual talents and skills to do something useful, significant, and worthwhile." - Dennis Bakke
    
• "The greater part of happiness or misery depends on our dispositions, and not on our circumstances." -  Martha Washington
    
• "We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread.  They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way." -  Viktor Frankl