Quotes About Willpower

He was a man who had never accepted the creed that others had the right to stop him. He set his goal and moved toward it...

Look, Gail." Roark got up, reached out, tore a thick branch off a tree, held it in both hands, one fist closed at each end; then, his wrists and knuckles tensed against the resistance, he bent the branch slowly into an arc. "Now I can make what I want of it: a bow, a spear, a cane, a railing. That's the meaning of life.

A qué le llamas libertad? –A no pedir nada. A no esperar nada. A no depender de nada. –¿Y si encontraras algo que quisieras? –No lo encontraré. Elegiré no verlo.

Throughout his life, whenever he became convinced that a course of action was right, the desire to follow it had come automatically.

I don't propose to force or be forced. Those who want me will come to me.

That future that they're all talking and trembling about—it will be as you made it, because you had the courage none of them could conceive of. All the roads to wealth that they're scrambling for now, it's your strength that broke them open. The strength to stand against everyone. The strength to recognize no will but your own.

He decided that pain was not a valid reason for stopping.

gathered into the single will of pressure, that a shaft of steel

An honest man does not desire until he has identified the object of his desire. He says: 'It is, therefore I want'. They say: 'I want it, therefore it is.

There is no excuse for not trying.

Have you ever noticed that if there's a hard way and an easy way, you choose the hard way every time? Why do you think that is?

Whatever you don't won't be enough. Try anyway.

no matter the circumstances outside ourselves, we always have a choice.

A thing cannot be conscious without having agency, but it can have agency without being conscious.

So much of life with infirmity came down to dignity and will.

We will change our ways significantly as a nation not when some laws tell us we have to (remember Prohibition?), but when we want

Emma had not yet come to understand that when hope is taken away from a man he is left with nothing, sometimes not even the will to live. And all the hope had been kicked out of Jack Harte long ago.

People talk about morality. Sometimes I think there's just what you can do, and what you can't. Well, I could. And I was going to.

Restricting yourself in this way may seem both difficult and arbitrary, but actually, this is the kind of discipline we exercise in other aspects of life. You may have a rule of thumb never to have more than two glasses of wine at a sitting.

Every choice we make is a testament to our autonomy, to our sense of self-determination.

You realize that you are in a hell of your own making, but you go on nevertheless. Because there is nothing else to do.

it's perfectly okay to paraphrase Nietzche: if you keep your focus, eventually your focus will keep you. Sometimes without parole.

Tim Stoutheart was afraid, too," I said. "But he went on. I expect you to do the same.

Valerian Kuibyshev, head of the Supreme Council of the Economy, blustered to the party organization in his bailiwick in January 1928. He allowed that the market "could be one current, but a Communist and Bolshevik has always been and is able to swim against the current," and concluded that "the will of the party can create miracles . . . and is creating and will create miracles despite all these market phenomena.