"If you want to build a ship,..." - Quote by Antoine De Saint Exupery
If you want to build a ship, don't summon people to buy wood, prepare tools, distribute jobs, and organize the work; teach people the yearning for the wide, boundless ocean.
More by Antoine De Saint Exupery
“It is such a secret place, the land of tears.”
“Nobody grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time. Now the clay of which you were shaped has dried and hardened, and naught in you will ever awaken the sleeping musician, the poet, the asronomer that possibly inhabited you in the beginning.”
“If I had fifty-three minutes to spend as I liked, I should walk at my leisure toward a spring of fresh water.”
More on Leadership
“If you're looking for the safe choice, you shouldn't be supporting a black guy named Barack Obama to be the next leader of the free world.”
“A society where the simple many obey the few seers can live; a society where all were seers could live even more fully. But a society where the mass is still simple and the seers are no longer attended to can achieve only superficiality, baseness, ugliness, and in the end extinction. On or back we must go: to stay here is death.”
“An instructor should exemplify the things he seeks to teach. It will be of great advantage if you yourself can do all you ask of your students and more.”
More on Vision
“Worse than being blind would be to be able to see but not have any vision.”
“Stop telling it like it is and start telling it like you WANT it to be!”
“Always leave people with a solution; the heaven if you do versus the hell if you don't. If you're really skillful you can put the person into the future solution. Shoaff used to say, 'Jim, I can see you now in your new clothes, in your new home, in your new car. I can see others walking up to you.' The Promise of the Future is an Awesome Force!”