20 Inspiring Leadership Quotes

The right words can engage the brain and bring an idea to life.  History’s best leaders understood the importance of providing motivation and direction to achieve larger goals. The character, actions and thoughts of a leader, good or bad, permeate an organisation or country. Your goal should be to demonstrate the best qualities of a leader.  These 20  quotes about leadership will help you think about and guide your actions.

  1. It is impossible to imagine anything which better becomes a ruler than mercy –  Seneca
  2. Do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit, but with humility of mind regard one another as more important than yourselves  –  Philippians 2:3
  3. Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again more intelligently  –  Henry Ford
  4. Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are truly endless  –    Mother Teresa
  5. Treat others the same way you want them to treat you  –  Luke 6:31
  6. Give me 6 hours to chop down a tree and I’ll spend the first 4 sharpening the axe – Abraham Lincoln
  7. While a good leader sustains momentum, a great leader increases it –  John C. Maxwell
  8. The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires  –  William Arthur Ward
  9. The greatest leader is not necessarily the one who does the greatest things. He is the one that gets the people to do the greatest things  –  President Ronald Reagan
  10. Always do what’s right. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest  –  Mark Twain
  11. A good leader takes a little more than his share of the blame, a little less than his share of the credit  –  Arnold Glasow
  12. Be willing to make decisions. That’s the most important quality in a good leader –  George S. Patton
  13. Earn your leadership every day  –  Michael Jordan
  14. Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do, and they will surprise you with their ingenuity  – George S. Patton
  15. Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower  –  Steve Job
  16. Where there is no vision, the people perish –  Proverbs 29:18
  17. Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power  –  President Abraham Lincoln
  18. A leader is one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way  – John C. Maxwell
  19. Don’t just delegate tasks to the next generation. If you delegate tasks, you create followers. Instead, delegate authority to create leaders – Craig Groeschel
  20. You don’t have to hold a position in order to be a leader  – Henry Ford

 

50 Quotes to Inspire Successful Leadership

Most people  believe  that the key to successful leadership is influence, not authority. Do you agree? The answer to that question, it seems, lies in whether the goal is to get others to work from a place of compliance or from a place of commitment  which underlines the difference between influential leadership and authoritative leadership.

Working within an influential leadership model, committed employees will give up discretionary time to solve problems, serve customers, and think creatively. On the other hand, people working under command and control, as we more commonly know it will only work to achieve compliance, doing only what needs to be done to get by.

As a  leader  you  must realise that every  decision  you  make  influences your  next five decisions.  Fortunately, great leaders are made, not born.

Maximise your effectiveness by emulating these words of wisdom that will motivate you in  achieving your goals  and  overcoming your fears:

  1. Build your own dreams, or someone else will hire you to build theirs — Farrah Gray
  2. Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence — Unknown
  3. proverb is to speech what salt is to food — Arabic Proverb
  4. Hold fast to dreams,  For if dreams die  Life is a broken-winged bird,  That cannot fly — Langston Hughes
  5. Remember no one can make you feel inferior without your consent — Eleanor Roosevelt
  6. We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light — Plato
  7. Every strike brings me closer to the next home run — Babe Ruth
  8. If I had six hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend the first four hours sharpening the axe — Abraham Lincoln
  9. If you look at what you have in life, you’ll always have more. If you look at what you don’t have in life, you’ll never have enough — Oprah Winfrey
  10. I can’t change the direction of the wind, but I can adjust my sails to always reach my destination — Jimmy Dean
  11. Believe you can and you’re halfway there — Theodore Roosevelt
  12. Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do, so throw off the bowlines, sail away from safe harbour, catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore, Dream, Discover — Mark Twain
  13. To handle yourself, use your head; to handle others, use your heart — Eleanor Roosevelt
  14. Too many of us are not living our dreams because we are living our fears — Les Brown
  15. Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve —  Unknown
  16. I am not a product of my circumstances. I am a product of my decisions — Stephen Covey
  17. When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it — Henry Ford
  18. The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any — Unknown
  19. It is during our darkest moments that we must focus to see the light — Unknown
  20. Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant — Robert Louis Stevenson
  21. The only way to do great work is to love what you do — Steve Jobs
  22. Change your thoughts and you change your world — Unknown
  23. The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me — Ayn Rand
  24. Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck — Dalai Lama
  25. You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have — Maya Angelou
  26. I have learned over the years that when one’s mind is made up, this diminishes fear — Rosa Parks
  27. I would rather die of passion than of boredom — Vincent Van Gogh
  28. A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new — Unknown
  29. If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else — Booker T. Washington
  30. Limitations live only in our minds. But if we use our imaginations, our possibilities become limitless — Unknown
  31. Certain things catch your eye, but pursue only those that capture the heart — Ancient Indian Proverb
  32. How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world — Unknown
  33. The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be — Ralph Waldo Emerson
  34. We can’t help everyone, but everyone can help someone — Ronald Reagan
  35. Everything you’ve ever wanted is on the other side of fear — George Addair
  36. Nothing will work unless you do — Maya Angelou
  37. I alone cannot change the world, but I can cast a stone across the water to create many ripples — Mother Teresa
  38. What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality — Plutarch
  39. Courage is being scared to death, but saddling up anyway — John Wayne
  40. Success is walking from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm — Winston Churchill
  41. It always seems impossible until it’s done — Nelson Mandela
  42. Successful and unsuccessful people do not vary greatly in their abilities. They vary in their desires to reach their potential — John Maxwell
  43. Without ambition one starts nothing. Without work one finishes nothing. The prize will not be sent to you. You have to win it — Ralph Waldo Emerson
  44. There are no traffic jams along the extra mile — Roger Staubach
  45. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning — Gloria Steinem
  46. Stealing someone else’s words frequently spares the embarrassment of eating your own — Peter Anderson
  47. The Book of Proverbs are the cream of a nation’s thought — Unknown
  48. Life is 10% what happens to me and 90% of how I react to it — Charles Swindoll
  49. The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity — Amelia Earhart
  50. When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down “happy”. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life — John Lennon

 

 

 

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