The document contains a collection of inspirational quotes from various leaders and thinkers. The quotes discuss topics such as the importance of involving others and working together, cultivating curiosity and continuous learning, serving others and creating purpose, and imagining positive futures through collaboration.

1. Inspirational
Quotes

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

3. You don’t build it for yourself.
You know what people want
and you build it for them.
Walt Disney

4. 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 Secretan
INSPIRE! What Great Leaders Do

5. Success is loving life
and daring to live it.
Maya Angelou

6. 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

7. 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

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

9. 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

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

11. 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

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

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

14. Leaders need to cultivate
debate and simultaneously
build consensus.
Michael Roberto
Why Great Leaders Don’t
Take YES for an Answer

15. 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

16. 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

17. The important thing is not to
stop questioning.
Albert Einstein

18. 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

19. 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

20. …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

21. Out of intense complexities,
intense simplicities emerge.
Winston Churchill

22. The highest-risk leader
is the one who thinks
she works alone.
Max DePree, Leadership Jazz

23. You must be the
change you wish to see.
Mahatma Gandhi

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

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

26. Life’s most urgent question is,
‘what are you doing for others’.
Martin Luther King Jr.

27. A mind, once stretched by a
new idea, never regains its
original dimensions.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

28. 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

29. 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 enters
into reality so that, knowing it better,
he or she can better transform it.
Paulo Freire

30. 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

31. You think that because you
understand ONE you understand
TWO, because one and one
makes two.
But you must also understand AND.
Sufi Proverb

32. I learned that if you’re a leader
and you’re not sick and tired of
communicating, you probably
aren’t doing a good enough job.
Max DePree

33. Coming together is a beginning;
keeping together is progress;
working together is success.
Henry Ford

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

35. 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, peopl
will have discovered fire!
Teilhard de Chardin

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

37. 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

38. 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

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

40. It’s not what you look at
that matters, it’s what
you see.
Henri David Thoreau

41. 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

42. Knowledge is experience,
everything else is just
information.
Albert Einstein

43. Discovery consists of seeing
what everybody has seen
and thinking what nobody
has thought.
Albert Szent-Gyorgyl

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

45. 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

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

47. The world is but a canvas to
our imaginations.
Henry Thoreau

48. A moment's insight is
sometimes worth a life's
experience.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

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

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

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

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

54. 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 Lucas
from Cynthia Kersey’s Unstoppable

55. To ask the hard question is
simple.
W.H. Auden

56. 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

57. 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

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

59. Imagination is the living
power and prime agent of
all human perception.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

60. One sees great things
from the valley, only small
things from the peak.
G.K. Chesteron

61. 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

62. 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

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

64. The best leaders,
like the best music,
inspire us to see new
possibilities.
Max DePree, Leadership Jazz

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

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

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

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

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

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

71. I need to know that you
care before I care to
know what you know.
James Autry

72. First Ponder,
Then Dare.
Helmuth Moltke

73. 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.

74. 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