Top 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