Quotes About Self-control

How to obey parents and listen to your mother's mind. How not to show your own thoughts, to put your feelings behind your face so you can take advantage of hidden opportunities. Why easy things are not worth pursuing. How to know your own worth and polish it, never flashing it around like a cheap ring. Why Chinese thinking is best.

it's your own fears that give them the power to chase you.

I am eleven years old, I know, and I am not serious enough. Last night I said to myself: tomorrow I will be good. Good? I wasn't any better than I was the day before. Now here is a new month, and I haven't yet thought out how to be more sensible, how to master my impulses and my temper. I am ashamed to be so undisciplined.

But I am not free. I am incapable of destruction.

Créeme, cuando hablo de vivir de acuerdo con los instintos, no es más que humo. Hay muchos instintos que deben ser reprimidos porque están descompuestos, podridos.

Everybody who keeps cool is superior. But who likes the man who keeps cool? Not I. If you go on like this I will fight!

If you have that rage to live, don't do something silly and mess up what you already have because you crave more. There is no amount of "more" that will ever satisfy. Once you are aware of this, once you are cognizant of the rage, then perhaps you can see when it leads you astray, taking over your thoughts, propelling you into a course of action you may regret.

The need of showing myself to be confident and perfectly at ease, precisely when I am least so. Talked much too much, as I am inclined to do after a period of solitude, losing self-control; for I was aware that I was talking too much, but could not check myself. In order to speak well, I need to feel that I am being listened to.

Control what you can control.

it. Block out the terrible thoughts that invade your mind. I

Because technology is devoted primarily to making our lives easier, it discourages us from disciplines, especially ones that involve disentangling ourselves from technology itself.

And then I know I'm being a man, not just some kid who's upset and wants it his way.

It was probably good you couldn't flip the love switch because sometimes it was what you needed even if you didn't want it.

can think of no right more fundamental than the right to peacefully steward the contents of one's own consciousness.

Your capacity to be offended isn't something that I or anyone else needs to respect. It isn't something that you should respect. In fact, it's something you should be on your guard for.

When you find another person annoying, sexually attractive, or inadvertently funny, you are experiencing the percolations of System 1. The heroic efforts you make to conceal these feelings out of politeness are the work of System 2.

how one uses one's attention, moment to moment, largely determines what kind of person one becomes. Our minds—and lives—are largely shaped by how we use them.

consciousness is never truly confined by what it knows. That which is aware of sadness is not sad. That which is aware of fear is not fearful.

Those who don't have a wife should sublimate their sexual energies with outdoor sports or long walks.

Abstinence is as easy to me as temperance would be difficult.

Pride is undoubtedly the original of anger; but pride, like every other passion, if it once breaks loose from reason, counteracts its own purposes.

Gratifying the flesh was wrong. He must keep himself pure because the carnal nature was anathema to spiritual men. That's what Brother Gabriel had told him, and Dale Gordon understood that truism now as never before. Because if he wasn't careful, this pleasure he was experiencing was going to overwhelm him, cloud his judgment, and jeopardize his mission. But

don't smoke.

I don't yell back at my mother. When I'm angry or scared or upset, I don't yell. I stay quiet. I've seen how she is, how she would get with Kent and with me and with other people, life if someone at the pharmacy got in the wrong line or asked too long a question, or if someone on the bus accidentally bumped her. I've watched her my whole life, the way people react to her. It doesn't actually help you get what you want, yelling and being like that. It only makes people think bad of you.