75 Inspiring Motivational Quotes on Leadership

            Here are some of my favorite leadership quotes. Tweet them, share them, but most important, use them to help you become an even better leader than you already are.

1. "To handle yourself, use your head; to handle others, use your heart." Eleanor Roosevelt
2. "The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires." William Arthur Ward
3. "It's hard to lead a cavalry charge if you think you look funny on a horse." Adlai E. Stevenson II
4. "Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be." Ralph Waldo Emerson
5. "Keep your fears to yourself, but share your courage with others." Robert Louis Stevenson
6. "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." Ronald Reagan
7. "Only one man in a thousand is a leader of men--the other 999 follow women." Groucho Marx
8. "Don't waste your energy trying to educate or change opinions; go over, under, through, and opinions will change organically when you're the boss. Or they won't. Who cares? Do your thing, and don't care if they like it." Tina Fey
9. "Power isn't control at all--power is strength, and giving that strength to others. A leader isn't someone who forces others to make him stronger; a leader is someone willing to give his strength to others that they may have the strength to stand on their own." Beth Revis
10. "Don't tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results." George Patton
11. "I have three precious things which I hold fast and prize. The first is gentleness; the second is frugality; the third is humility, which keeps me from putting myself before others. Be gentle and you can be bold; be frugal and you can be liberal; avoid putting yourself before others and you can become a leader among men." Lao Tzu
12. "Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it." Dwight D. Eisenhower
13. "Victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan. John F. Kennedy
14. "Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things." Peter F. Drucker
15. "You are not here merely to make a living. You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand." Woodrow Wilson
16. "Example is not the main thing in influencing others. It is the only thing." Albert Schweitzer
17. "Leaders must be close enough to relate to others, but far enough ahead to motivate them." John C. Maxwell
18. "The mark of a great man is one who knows when to set aside the important things in order to accomplish the vital ones." Brandon Sanderson
19. "Leadership is not about titles, positions, or flow charts. It is about one life influencing another." John C. Maxwell
20. "You have to be burning with an idea, or a problem, or a wrong that you want to right. If you're not passionate enough from the start, you'll never stick it out." Steve Jobs
21. "A leader...is like a shepherd. He stays behind the flock, letting the most nimble go out ahead, whereupon the others follow, not realizing that all along they are being directed from behind." Nelson Mandela
22. "Being responsible sometimes means pissing people off." Colin Powell
23. "Do you know that one of the great problems of our age is that we are governed by people who care more about feelings than they do about thoughts and ideas?" Margaret Thatcher
24. "A leader is a dealer in hope." Napoleon
25. "The best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good men to do what he wants done, and self-restraint to keep from meddling with them while they do it." Theodore Roosevelt
26. "I don't see myself being special; I just see myself having more responsibilities than the next man. People look to me to do things for them, to have answers." Tupac Shakur
27. "If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. But do not care to convince him. Men will believe what they see. Let them see." Henry David Thoreau
28. "I cannot trust a man to control others who cannot control himself." Robert E. Lee
29. "The day the soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help them or concluded that you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership." Colin Powell
30. "Consensus: The process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values, and policies in search of something in which no one believes, but to which no one objects; the process of avoiding the very issues that have to be solved, merely because you cannot get agreement on the way ahead. What great cause would have been fought and won under the banner: 'I stand for consensus?'" Margaret Thatcher
31. "A leader takes people where they want to go. A great leader takes people where they don't necessarily want to go, but ought to be." Rosalynn Carter
32. "There is a difference between being a leader and being a boss. Both are based on authority. A boss demands blind obedience; a leader earns his authority through understanding and trust." Klaus Balkenhol
33. "You get in life what you have the courage to ask for." Nancy D. Solomon
34. "In the end, it is important to remember that we cannot become what we need to be by remaining what we are." Max De Pree
35. "We're here for a reason. I believe a bit of the reason is to throw little torches out to lead people through the dark." Whoopi Goldberg
36. "A leader isn't someone who forces others to make him stronger; a leader is someone willing to give his strength to others so that they may have the strength to stand on their own." Beth Revis
37. "Always remember, Son, the best boss is the one who bosses the least. Whether it's cattle, or horses, or men; the least government is the best government." Ralph Moody
38. "If you really want the key to success, start by doing the opposite of what everyone else is doing." Brad Szollose
39. "'Give as few orders as possible,' his father had told him once long ago. 'Once you've given orders on a subject, you must always give orders on that subject.'" Frank Herbert (from Dune)
40. "The art of leadership is saying no, not yes. It is very easy to say yes." Tony Blair
41. "Wisdom equals knowledge plus courage. You have to not only know what to do and when to do it, but you have to also be brave enough to follow through." Jarod Kintz
42. "In a battle between two ideas, the best one doesn't necessarily win. No, the idea that wins is the one with the most fearless heretic behind it." Seth Godin
43. "If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea." Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
44. "Remember, teamwork begins by building trust. And the only way to do that is to overcome our need for invulnerability." Patrick Lencioni
45. "No guts, no story." Chris Brady
46. "Leadership is an action, not a position." Donald McGannon
47. "Surround yourself with great people; delegate authority; get out of the way" Ronald Reagan
48. "I cannot give you a formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure, which is: try to please everybody." Herbert Bayard Swope
49. "Show me the man you honor and I will know what kind of man you are." Thomas John Carlisle
50. "The challenge of leadership is to be strong but not rude; be kind, but not weak; be bold, but not a bully; be humble, but not timid; be proud, but not arrogant; have humor, but without folly." Jim Rohn
51. "A man always has two reasons for doing anything: a good reason and the real reason." J.P. Morgan
52. "If you spend your life trying to be good at everything, you will never be great at anything." Tom Rath
53. "Average leaders raise the bar on themselves; good leaders raise the bar for others; great leaders inspire others to raise their own bar." Orrin Woodward
54. "Don't blow off another's candle for it won't make yours shine brighter." Jaachynma N.E. Agu
55. "Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision." Peter F. Drucker
56. "When you put together deep knowledge about a subject that intensely matters to you, charisma happens. You gain courage to share your passion, and when you do that, folks follow." Jerry Porras
57. "A good leader leads the people from above them. A great leader leads the people from within them." M.D. Arnold
58. "The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy." Martin Luther King, Jr.
59. "The very essence of leadership is that you have to have vision. You can't blow an uncertain trumpet." Father Theodore M. Hesburgh
60. "It is absolutely necessary...for me to have persons that can think for me, as well as execute orders." George Washington
61. "When eagles are silent, parrots begin to chatter." Winston Churchill
62. "A leader takes people where they would never go on their own." Hans Finzel
63. "You don't lead by pointing and telling people some place to go. You lead by going to that place and making a case." Ken Kesey
64. "A man who wants to lead the orchestra must turn his back on the crowd." Max Lucado
65. "Become the kind of leader that people would follow voluntarily, even if you had no title or position." Brian Tracy
66. "I start with the premise that the function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers." Ralph Nader
67. "Anyone can hold the helm when the sea is calm." Publilius Syrus
68. "A great person attracts great people and knows how to hold them together. "Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
69. "My job is not to be easy on people. My job is to take these great people we have and to push them and make them even better." Steve Jobs
70. "People buy into the leader before they buy into the vision." John Maxwell
71. "To have long-term success as a coach or in any position of leadership, you have to be obsessed in some way." Pat Riley
72. "A good leader is a person who takes a little more than his share of the blame and a little less than his share of the credit." John Maxwell
73. "A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week." George Patton
74. "Earn your leadership every day." Michael Jordan
75. "Success at the highest level comes down to one question: 'Can you make the choice that your happiness can come from someone else's success?' No one has qualities like courage, vision, charisma, adaptability, and decisiveness in equal measure. But every great leader does make the same decision--and so can you." Jeff Haden (sorry, couldn't resist)

75 Inspiring Motivational Quotes About Success

Success, as with most things, starts with attitude. When you're struggling, a small burst of inspiration can make a huge difference.

Here are 75 quotes about success to inspire you to keep pushing forward and achieve your dreams.

1. "If you set your goals ridiculously high and it's a failure, you will fail above everyone else's success." James Cameron
2. "Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it." Henry David Thoreau
3. "Things work out best for those who make the best of how things work out." John Wooden
4. "Entrepreneurs average 3.8 failures before final success. What sets the successful ones apart is their amazing persistence." Lisa M. Amos
5. "If you are not willing to risk the usual, you will have to settle for the ordinary." Jim Rohn
6. "Take up one idea. Make that one idea your life--think of it, dream of it, live on that idea. Let the brain, muscles, nerves, every part of your body, be full of that idea, and just leave every other idea alone. This is the way to success." Swami Vivekananda
7. "Stop chasing the money and start chasing the passion." Tony Hsieh
8. "All our dreams can come true if we have the courage to pursue them." Walt Disney
9. "If you are willing to do more than you are paid to do, eventually you will be paid to do more than you do." Anonymous
10. "Success is walking from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm." Winston Churchill
11. "Whenever you see a successful person, you only see the public glories, never the private sacrifices to reach them." Vaibhav Shah
12. "Success? I don't know what that word means. I'm happy. But success, that goes back to what in somebody's eyes success means. For me, success is inner peace. That's a good day for me." Denzel Washington
13. "Opportunities don't happen. You create them." Chris Grosser
14. "Try not to become a person of success, but rather try to become a person of value." Albert Einstein
15. "It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change." Charles Darwin
16. "Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people." Eleanor Roosevelt
17. "The best revenge is massive success." Frank Sinatra
18. "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." Thomas Edison
19. "A successful man is one who can lay a firm foundation with the bricks others have thrown at him." David Brinkley
20. "No one can make you feel inferior without your consent." Eleanor Roosevelt
21. "The whole secret of a successful life is to find out what is one's destiny to do, and then do it." Henry Ford
22. "If you're going through hell, keep going." Winston Churchill
23. "What seems to us as bitter trials are often blessings in disguise." Oscar Wilde
24. "The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success." Bruce Feirstein
25. "Don't be afraid to give up the good to go for the great." John D. Rockefeller
26. "Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you." Nathaniel Hawthorne
27. "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." Albert Einstein
28. "There are two types of people who will tell you that you cannot make a difference in this world: those who are afraid to try and those who are afraid you will succeed." Ray Goforth
29. "Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can." Arthur Ashe
30. "People ask, 'What's the best role you've ever played?' The next one." Kevin Kline
31. "I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have." Thomas Jefferson
32. "The starting point of all achievement is desire." Napoleon Hill
33. "Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day-in and day-out." Robert Collier
34. "If you want to achieve excellence, you can get there today. As of this second, quit doing less-than-excellent work." Thomas J. Watson
35. "All progress takes place outside the comfort zone." Michael John Bobak
36. "You may only succeed if you desire succeeding; you may only fail if you do not mind failing." Philippos
37. "Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear--not absence of fear." Mark Twain
38. "Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone." Pablo Picasso
39. "We become what we think about most of the time, and that's the strangest secret." Earl Nightingale
40. "The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary." Vidal Sassoon
41. "I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everyone." Bill Cosby
42. "Though no one can go back and make a brand-new start, anyone can start from now and make a brand-new ending." Carl Bard
43. "I find that when you have a real interest in life and a curious life, that sleep is not the most important thing." Martha Stewart
44. "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 the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover." Mark Twain
45. "The first step toward success is taken when you refuse to be a captive of the environment in which you first find yourself." Mark Caine
46. "Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect." Mark Twain
47. "The successful warrior is the average man, with laser-like focus." Bruce Lee
48. "Rarely have I seen a situation where doing less than the other guy is a good strategy." Jimmy Spithill
49. "Keep on going, and the chances are that you will stumble on something, perhaps when you are least expecting it. I never heard of anyone ever stumbling on something sitting down." Charles F. Kettering
50. "If you genuinely want something, don't wait for it--teach yourself to be impatient." Gurbaksh Chahal
51. "You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something--your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life." Steve Jobs
52. "If you want to make a permanent change, stop focusing on the size of your problems and start focusing on the size of you!" T. Harv Eker
53. "Successful people do what unsuccessful people are not willing to do. Don't wish it were easier; wish you were better." Jim Rohn
54. "The No. 1 reason people fail in life is because they listen to their friends, family, and neighbors." Napoleon Hill
55. "In my experience, there is only one motivation, and that is desire. No reasons or principle contain it or stand against it." Jane Smiley
56. "Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time." George Bernard Shaw
57. "I don't want to get to the end of my life and find that I lived just the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well." Diane Ackerman
58. "Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going." Jim Ryun
59. "Our greatest fear should not be of failure ... but of succeeding at things in life that don't really matter." Francis Chan
60. "If you don't design your own life plan, chances are you'll fall into someone else's plan. And guess what they have planned for you? Not much." Jim Rohn
61. "Nobody ever wrote down a plan to be broke, fat, lazy, or stupid. Those things are what happen when you don't have a plan." Larry Winget
62. "To be successful you must accept all challenges that come your way. You can't just accept the ones you like." Mike Gafka
63. "Be content to act, and leave the talking to others." Baltasar
64. "You may have to fight a battle more than once to win it." Margaret Thatcher
65. "Be patient with yourself. Self-growth is tender; it's holy ground. There's no greater investment." Stephen Covey
66. "I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite." G. K. Chesterton
67. "Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up." Thomas A. Edison
68. "The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize." Robert Hughes
69. "What would you attempt to do if you knew you would not fail?" Robert Schuller
70. "Always bear in mind that your own resolution to success is more important than any other one thing." Abraham Lincoln
71. "Successful and unsuccessful people do not vary greatly in their abilities. They vary in their desires to reach their potential." John Maxwell
72. "Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It's quite simple, really: Double your rate of failure. You are thinking of failure as the enemy of success. But it isn't at all. You can be discouraged by failure or you can learn from it, so go ahead and make mistakes. Make all you can. Because remember that's where you will find success." Thomas J. Watson
73. "Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere." Albert Einstein
74. "Success is just a war of attrition. Sure, there's an element of talent you should probably possess. But if you just stick around long enough, eventually something is going to happen." Dax Shepard
75. "My tombstone? I'm thinking something along the lines of, 'Geez, he was just here a minute ago.'" George Carlin