Quotes About Self-control

Even on a daily basis, one can make this awareness a part of one's life. When you are hungry and want to eat, just postpone it by ten minutes. Be conscious of your hunger, do not get busy with some other activity. Consciously postpone your meal and wait.

Once you take charge of your inner life, there is no such thing as stress.

If you look at your life closely, you will find that you have done the most idiotic and life-negative things when you were angry.

The choice is always before you: to respond consciously to the present; or to react compulsively to it.

If your thought and your emotion are of your making, you can mold them any way you like. There is scientific proof today that without ingesting a drop of alcohol or any other substance, you can get fully intoxicated by yourself. An Israeli organic chemist, Raphael

kriya yoga cannot be done with people who talk "freedom" all the time. It is not for people who keep asking, "Why am I not free to eat my ice cream? Why can't I wake up whenever I feel like it? Why can't I eat, drink, or have sex with whatever, whoever, whenever I feel like?" If you take the path of kriya, a certain fundamental discipline has to be brought into all physical, psychological, and emotional processes.

You can't pull a gun just because a crazy person wants to talk to you. If I did that I'd never get through a family Christmas.

Between stimulus and response there is a gap. It's a moment of choice about our actions and reactions. Most people blow past this, react out of habit and then claim they were helpless against themselves. Mind the gap.

We first make our habits, and then our habits make us. —John Dryden, seventeenth-century English poet and dramatist

It is in your power to withdraw yourself whenever you desire. Perfect tranquility within consists in the good ordering of the mind, the realm of your own.

Choose not to be harmed—and you won't feel harmed. Don't feel harmed—and you haven't been.

Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world? neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility. . . .

Which is recorded of Socrates, that he was able both to abstain from, and to enjoy, those things which many are too weak to abstain from, and cannot enjoy without excess. But to be strong enough both to bear the one and to be sober in the other is the mark of a man who has a perfect and invincible soul.

When force of circumstance upsets your equanimity, lose no time in recovering your self-control, and do not remain out of tune longer than you can help. Habitual recurrence to the harmony will increase your mastery of it.

It is within our power not to make a judgement about something, and so not disturb our minds; for nothing in itself possesses the power to form our judgements.

The best revenge is not to do as they do.

It is in your own power to maintain the beauty of your soul, or to be a decent human being.

Ambition means tying your well-being to what other people say or do. Self-indulgence means tying it to the things that happen to you. Sanity means tying it to your own actions.

The offender needs pity, not wrath; those who must needs be corrected, should be treated with tact and gentleness; and one must be always ready to learn better. 'The best kind of revenge is, not to become like unto them.

Never value anything as profitable that compels you to break your promise, to lose your self-respect, to hate any man, to suspect, to curse, to act the hypocrite, to desire anything that needs walls and curtains:

It's time you realized that you have something in you more powerful and miraculous than the things that affect you and make you dance like a puppet. What's in my thoughts at this moment? Fear? Jealousy? Desire? Feelings like that?

How cruel—to forbid people to want what they think is good for them. And yet that's just what you won't let them do when you get angry at their misbehavior. They're drawn toward what they think is good for them. —But it's not good for them. Then show them that. Prove it to them. Instead of losing your temper.

The best revenge is not to be like that.

Don't be overheard complaining ... not even to yourself.