Quotes from Integrity: The Courage to Meet the Demands of Reality

“If people are really narcissistic or have a need to be seen as more than they really are, or to be admired as having it all together, then they cannot be followed and trusted by others.”
― Henry Cloud, quote from Integrity: The Courage to Meet the Demands of Reality

“Just as we leave the effects of our work behind in results, we leave the effects of our interactions with people in their hearts, minds, and souls.”
― Henry Cloud, quote from Integrity: The Courage to Meet the Demands of Reality

“Character = the ability to meet the demands of reality.”
― Henry Cloud, quote from Integrity: The Courage to Meet the Demands of Reality

“Who a person is will ultimately determine if their brains, talents, competencies, energy, effort, deal-making abilities, and opportunities will succeed.”
― Henry Cloud, quote from Integrity: The Courage to Meet the Demands of Reality

“When a person travels through a few years with an organization, or with a partnership, or any other kind of working association, he leaves a 'wake' behind in these two areas, task and relationship: what did he accomplish and how did he deal with people?”
― Henry Cloud, quote from Integrity: The Courage to Meet the Demands of Reality

“That is why success and fruitfulness depend as much upon focusing on the “who” you are as much as the “what” of the work you do. Invest in your character, and it will give you the returns that you are looking for by only investing in the work itself. You can’t do the latter without the former.”
― Henry Cloud, quote from Integrity: The Courage to Meet the Demands of Reality

“At some level, we all know that “making it” involves more than talent or ability. It has something to do with personhood as well. Then”
― Henry Cloud, quote from Integrity: The Courage to Meet the Demands of Reality

“who a person is will ultimately determine if their brains, talents, competencies, energy, effort, deal-making abilities, and opportunities will succeed. It”
― Henry Cloud, quote from Integrity: The Courage to Meet the Demands of Reality

“The most important tool ultimately is the person and his or her makeup, and yet it seems to get the least amount of attention and work.”
― Henry Cloud, quote from Integrity: The Courage to Meet the Demands of Reality

“The greatest people are the ones who have not sought greatness, but served greatly the causes, values, and missions that were much bigger than them.”
― Henry Cloud, quote from Integrity: The Courage to Meet the Demands of Reality

“A law in physics, called the second law of thermodynamics, says that entropy, or chaos (the opposite of growth…a winding-down process), increases over time. You can readily see this in life, and we have already talked about it. Anything left to its own is naturally dying, getting more disorganized, rusting, etc. Even the universe itself is subject to that process.”
― Henry Cloud, quote from Integrity: The Courage to Meet the Demands of Reality

“some things are not going to move, and we are the smaller ship that must adjust our course and steer in a different direction if we are going to make it.”
― Henry Cloud, quote from Integrity: The Courage to Meet the Demands of Reality

“the difference between winners and losers is not that winners never lose. The difference is that winners lose well, and losers lose poorly.”
― Henry Cloud, quote from Integrity: The Courage to Meet the Demands of Reality

“When a person travels through a few years with an organization, or with a partnership, or any other kind of working association, he leaves a “wake” behind in these two areas, task and relationship: What did he accomplish and how did he deal with people? And we can tell a lot about that person from the nature of the wake.”
― Henry Cloud, quote from Integrity: The Courage to Meet the Demands of Reality

About the author

Popular quotes

“Having screwed around the last hour trying to decide whether to write in the style of Isaac Asimov (that version featured Caitlin as a Venusian chick with one eye and three breasts) or Dr. Seuss (“I am Nick/Nick is sick/Nick tells Debbie to…” well, you get the idea),”
― Alex Flinn, quote from Breathing Underwater

“Looking down, she became aware of the water, which was covered with a film of calcinous hard-water particles of dirt and soap, and of the body that was sitting in it, somehow no longer quite her own. All at once she was afraid that she was dissolving, coming apart layer by layer like a piece of cardboard in a gutter puddle.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Edible Woman

“But chance runs like a river through all our lives, and being prepared for surprise is the best we can do.”
― Kenneth Oppel, quote from Skybreaker

“Some things you carry around inside you as though they were part of your blood and bones, and when that happens, there’s nothing you can do to forget

…But I had never been much of a believer. If anything, I believed that things got worse before they got better. I believed good people suffered... people who have faith were so lucky; you didn’t want to ruin it for them. You didn’t want to plant doubt where there was none. You had to treat suck individuals tenderly and hope that some of whatever they were feeling rubs off on you

Those who love you will love you forever, without questions or boundaries or the constraints of time. Daily life is real, unchanging as a well-built house. But houses burn; they catch fire in the middle of the night.

The night is like any other night of disaster, with every fact filtered through a veil of disbelief. The rational world has spun so completely out of its orbit, there is no way to chart or expect what might happen next

At that point, they were both convinced that love was a figment of other people’s imaginations, an illusion fashioned out of smoke and air that really didn’t exist

Fear, like heat, rises; it drifts up to the ceiling and when it falls down it pours out in a hot and horrible rain



True love, after all, could bind a man where he didn’t belong. It could wrap him in cords that were all but impossible to break

Fear is contagious. It doubles within minutes; it grows in places where there’s never been any doubt before

The past stays with a man, sticking to his heels like glue, invisible and heartbreaking and unavoidable, threaded to the future, just as surely as day is sewn to night

He looked at girls and saw only sweet little fuckboxes, there for him to use, no hearts involved, no souls, and, most assuredly no responsibilities.

Welcome to the real world. Herein is the place where no one can tell you whether or not you’ve done the right thing.

I could tell people anything I wanted to, and whatever I told them, that would be the truth as far as they were concerned. Whoever I said I was, well then, that’s who id be

The truths by which she has lived her life have evaporated, leaving her empty of everything except the faint blue static of her own skepticism. She has never been a person to question herself; now she questions everything

Something’s, are true no matter how hard you might try to bloc them out, and a lie is always a lie, no matter how prettily told

You were nothing more than a speck of dust, good-looking dust, but dust all the same

Some people needed saving

She doesn’t want to waste precious time with something as prosaic as sleep. Every second is a second that belongs to her; one she understands could well be her last

Why wait for anything when the world is so cockeyed and dangerous? Why sit and stare into the mirror, too fearful of what may come to pass to make a move?

At last she knows how it feels to take a chance when everything in the world is at stake, breathless and heedless and desperate for more

She’ll be imagining everything that’s out in front of them, road and cloud and sky, all the elements of a future, the sort you have to put together by hand, slowly and carefully until the world is yours once more”
― Alice Hoffman, quote from Blue Diary

“This violent state of mind.
This violent state of mine.”
― Don Winslow, quote from Savages

Interesting books

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.