53 Servant Leadership Quotes and Sayings to Inspire You

Servant leadership involves cultivating leaders who prioritize their team’s needs, facilitating a supportive and empowering environment.

If you’re seeking inspiration to enhance your servant leadership skills, or need quotations to invigorate your discourse, this collection of servant leadership quotes can provide what you need.

These quotes aim to inspire and guide you towards success in your professional and personal endeavors.

The concept of servant leadership, originally introduced by Robert Greenleaf in 1970, emphasizes empowering others and when implemented, it can drive unprecedented success within teams or companies.

Also read: Lead by Example Quotes to Show Leadership and Life Is Short Quotes to Enjoy Every Moment of Life

As leadership challenges continue to evolve, the concept of servant leadership adapts and develops, with new perspectives constantly enriching its understanding.

Therefore, whether you’re seeking motivation or wish to examine servant leadership examples for a unique form of inspiration, this collection has much to offer.


Top 10 Servant Leadership Quotes

The miracle is this–the more we share, the more we have. ~ Leonard Nimoy.

The miracle is not that we do this work, but that we are happy to do it. ~ Mother Teresa.

Listen for the call of your destiny, and when it comes, release your plans and follow. ~ Mollie Marti.

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The ear of the leader must ring with the voices of the people. ~ Woodrow Wilson.

The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

Serving others prepares you to lead others. ~ Jim George.

Treat employees like they make a different and they will. ~ Jim Goodnight.

As we look ahead into the next century, leaders will be those who empower others. ~ Bill Gates.

The quality of a true warrior is that he is in service to a purpose greater than himself; that is, to a transcendent cause. ~ Robert Bly.

It is amazing what you can accomplish if you don’t care who gets the credit. ~ Harry Truman.

Inspiring Servant Leadership Quotes

The true heroes of the new millennium will be servant leaders, quietly working out of the spotlight to transform our world. ~ Ann McGee-Cooper.

We must be silent before we can listen. We must listen before we can learn. We must learn before we can prepare. We must prepare before we can serve. We must serve before we can lead. ~ William Arthur Ward.

Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are. ~ John Wooden.

The greatness of a man is not in how much wealth he acquires but in his integrity and in his ability to affect those around him positively. ~ Bob Marley.

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People do not care how much you know until they know how much you care. ~ John C. Maxwell.

The servant-leader is servant first. It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. ~ Robert K. Greenleaf.

Servant leadership is all about making the goals clear and then rolling your sleeves up and doing whatever it takes to help people win. In that situation, they don’t work for you; you work for them. ~ Ken Blanchard.

The first and most important choice a leader makes is the choice to serve, without which one’s capacity to lead is severely limited. ~ Robert Greenleaf.

If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else. ~ Booker Washington.

Famous Servant Leadership Quotes

Service is the rent that you pay for a room on this earth. ~ Shirley Chisholm.

You can have anything you want in life if you just help enough other people get what they want. ~ Zig Ziglar.

You take people as far as they will go, not as far as you would like them to go. ~ Jeanette Rankin.

It’s not about trying to find something to help you be a more effective leader. It’s about trying to be a better person. The other will follow. ~ James A. Autry.

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What we do for ourselves dies with us. What we do for others and the world, is and remains immortal. ~ Albert Pine.

Service is the very purpose of life. It is the rent we pay for living on the planet. ~ Marian Wright Edelman.

Working hard for something we don’t care about is called stress. Working hard for something we love is called passion. ~ Simon Sinek.

Your rewards in life will be in direct proportion to the value of your service to others. ~ Brian Tracy.

Servant-leadership is more than a concept, it is a fact. Any great leader, by which I also mean an ethical leader of any group, will see herself or himself as a servant of that group and will act accordingly. ~ M. Scott Peck.

Best Servant Leadership Quotes

We make a living by what we get. We make a life by what we give. ~ Winston Churchill.

I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy. ~ Rabindranath Tagore.

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A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves. ~ Lao Tzu.

Servant leadership is easy for people with high self-esteem. Such people have no problem giving credit to others. They have no problem listening to other people for ideas. They have no problem in building other people up. ~ Ken Blanchard.

It is one of the most beautiful compensations of life that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself. Serve and thou shall be served. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson.

A life without a cause is a life without effect. ~ Paulo Coelho.

In a servant leadership culture we learn by choice or example that if we want to be great, we have to serve others respectfully. ~ Vern Dosch.

Leaders don’t create more followers, they create more leaders. ~ Tom Peters.

Bosses push, Leaders pull. Real leadership is servant leadership. ~ Dave Ramsey.

A true natural servant automatically responds to any problem by listening first. ~ Robert Greenleaf.

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Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others? ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

Where there is no community, trust, respect, ethical behavior are difficult for the young to learn and for the old to maintain. ~ Robert Greenleaf.

It is better to lead from behind and to put others in front, especially when you celebrate victory when nice things occur. You take the front line when there is danger. Then people will appreciate your leadership. ~ Nelson Mandela.

I’ll lift you and you’ll lift me and we’ll both ascend together. ~ John Greenleaf Whittier.

A noble leader answers not to the trumpet calls of self promotion, but to the hushed whispers of necessity. ~ Mollie Marti.

Inspirational Servant Leadership Quotes

Everybody can be great, because everybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace, a soul generated by love. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

The goal of many leaders is to get people to think more highly of the leader. The goal of a great leader is to help people to think more highly of themselves. ~ J. Carla Nortcutt.

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Success is empty if you arrive at the finish line alone. The best reward is to get there surrounded by winners. ~ Howard Schultz.

Serving people means growing their capacity and implies that everyone can contribute. ~ Juana Bordas.

Twenty-first-century leadership relationship dynamics are from the bottom up rather than the top down; from the outside in, rather than the inside out. ~ James M. Strock.

Let your light shine as an inspiration to humanity and be the reason someone believes in the goodness of people. ~ Germany Kent.

The highest reward for a person’s toil is not what they get for it, but what they become by it. ~ John Ruskin.


So these were the 53 famous quotes about Servant Leadership.

If you like these quotes and sayings, then you can also read my other popular blog posts on the topics of Jack of All Trades quotes and History Repeating Itself quotes.

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Chandan Negi
Chandan Negi

I’m the Founder of InternetPillar.com and InboxQuotes.com - I love sharing inspirational quotes and motivational content to inspire and motivate people - #quotes #motivation #internetpillar #inboxquotes