Please find below my favourite collection of quotes and one-liners about effective and deep communication, building strong relationships – both at work and in life, and effective team management and leadership.

“Paradoxically, the ability to be alone is the condition for the ability to love.”

—Erich Fromm

“If you judge people, you have no time to love them.”

― Mother Teresa

“The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn’t being said.”

Peter Drucker

“There are two things people want more than sex and money… recognition and praise.”
– Mary Kay Ash

“When you are 80 years old, and in a quiet moment of reflection narrating for only yourself the most personal version of your life story, the telling that will be most compact and meaningful will be the series of choices you have made. In the end, we are our choices. Build yourself a great story.” — Jeff Bezos

“You cannot truly listen to anyone and do anything else at the same time.”

― M. Scott Peck

“You can’t let praise or criticism get to you. It’s a weakness to get caught up in either one.” – John Wooden

“Wise men speak because they have something to say; Fools because they have to say something.”

Plato

“Dream more than others think practical. Expect more than others think possible. Care more than others think wise.” Howard Schultz

“I speak to everyone in the same way, whether he is the garbage man or the president of the university.”

― Albert Einstein

“Effective communication is 20% what you know and 80% how you feel about what you know.”

Jim Rohn

“I have always strenuously supported the right of every man to his own opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies to another this right, makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it.”

― Thomas Paine

“There is nothing stronger than gentleness.”

— John Wooden

“I am a storyteller, for better and for worse.

I suspect that a feeling for stories, for narrative, is a universal human disposition, going with our powers of language, consciousness of self, and autobiographical memory.

The act of writing, when it goes well, gives me a pleasure, a joy, unlike any other. It takes me to another place — irrespective of my subject — where I am totally absorbed and oblivious to distracting thoughts, worries, preoccupations, or indeed the passage of time. In those rare, heavenly states of mind, I may write nonstop until I can no longer see the paper. Only then do I realize that evening has come and that I have been writing all day.

Over a lifetime, I have written millions of words, but the act of writing seems as fresh, and as much fun, as when I started it nearly seventy years ago”.

– Oliver Sacks

“Music is the greatest communication in the world. Even if people don’t understand the language that you’re singing in, they still know good music when they hear it.”

Lou Rawls

“The one thing you can’t take away from me is the way I choose to respond to what you do to me. The last of one’s freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any given circumstance.”

– Viktor Frankl

The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

“If you have nothing to say, say nothing.”

Mark Twain

“When you give yourself permission to communicate what matters to you in every situation you will have peace despite rejection or disapproval. Putting a voice to your soul helps you to let go of the negative energy of fear and regret.”
― Shannon L. Alder

It is a sin to be silent when it is your duty to protest.

Abraham Lincoln

“Not the fastest horse can catch a word spoken in anger.”

Chinese proverb

“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

― Maya Angelou

“One of the most important things you can do on this earth is to let people know they are not alone.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“I don’t like that man. I must get to know him better.”

— Abraham Lincoln

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”

― Maya Angelou

“When a person can’t find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure.”

― Viktor E. Frankl

“We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.”

― Leo Tolstoy

“When you accept yourself, the whole world accepts you.”

― Lao Tzu

“I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned.”

― Richard Feynman

“The most important single ingredient in the formula of success is knowing how to get along with people.”―

Theodore Roosevelt

“The highest forms of understanding we can achieve are laughter and human compassion.”

― Richard P. Feynman

Opportunities don’t knock, they whisper. So shut up and listen.

— Thomas Leonard

“You can talk with someone for years, everyday, and still, it won’t mean as much as what you can have when you sit in front of someone, not saying a word, yet you feel that person with your heart, you feel like you have known the person for forever…. connections are made with the heart, not the tongue.”
― C. JoyBell C.

“Much unhappiness has come into the world because of bewilderment and things left unsaid.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“Assumptions are the termites of relationships.”
― Henry Winkler