Quotes About Self-control

If I leave my phone in the car and go to dinner or something for a few hours, I'm very proud of myself.

We all would like to think that we would never, in a million years, have a glass of wine and get behind the wheel of a car, but it could happen, and then you could run a red light.

Never miss a chance to shut up

Temptations, unlike opportunities, will always give you many second chances.

Never pass by a chance to shut up.

refraining is very much the method of becoming a dharmic person. It's the quality of not grabbing for entertainment the minute we feel a slight edge of boredom coming on. It's the practice of not immediately filling up space just because there's a gap.

In essence the practice is always the same: instead of falling prey to a chain reaction of revenge or self-hatred, we gradually learn to catch the emotional reaction and drop the story lines.

Inner peace begins the moment you choose not to allow another person or event to control your emotions.

Calm down, she tells herself. Just because this has never happened to you before. Because you have reached the ripe age of thirty-one without knowing this peculiar derangement. For derangement is what it surely is; only by stern physical effort can she keep herself from looking at him, touching him.

Measuring requires, first and foremost, analytical ability. But it also demands that measurement be used to make self-control possible, rather than abused to control people from the outside and above—that is, to dominate them.

Effectiveness is, after all, not a «subject», but a selfdiscipline.

Saint Thomas Aquinas says, wisely, that the only way to drive out a bad passion is by a stronger good passion. The same is true of thoughts as of passions. When your mind wanders, like a child, your will must bring it back, like a mother. [. . .] The will-parent must discipline the mind-child, avoiding both the opposite extremes commonly made in disciplining either children or thoughts: tyranny or permissiveness.

One of the reasons lust is bad (not the only reason) is that it makes you stupid. Like any addiction, it blinds your vision to everything else and focuses it on the one thing that is the object of your addiction.

We too can love with the will even when we do not have loving emotions or feelings. We make this distinction toward ourselves quite easily, so we should be able to do it toward others too when necessary.

Tempting is not forcing.

Shefrin and Statman hypothesize the existence of a split in the human psyche. One side of our personality is an internal planner with a long-term perspective, an authority who insists on decisions that weight the future more heavily than the present. The other side seeks immediate gratification. These two sides are in constant conflict.

There is another use of the term 'human', one proposed by Joseph Fletcher, a major figure in the development of bioethics. Fletcher compiled a list of what he called 'Indicators of Humanhood' that includes the following: self-awareness, self-control, a sense of the future, a sense of the past, the capacity to relate to others, concern for others, communication and curiosity.

Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to step out in front of a moving car. You would call that not a disease but an error of judgment.

Quando você é louco, aprende a ficar calado.

She did not move. Nor did she scream or faint; her only actions were to draw back the hem of her dress from where it brushed the shiny dome of his skull and to breathe deeply, several times, with her eyes shut. Her father had taught her this as a remedy for panic. He had taught her well; it worked.

1. Podemos controlar lo que hacemos, pero no lo que somos. 2. Por otra parte, y simultáneamente, o que hacemos depende de lo que somos (de lo que hemos de hacer con ello), y lo que somos puede verse modificado por lo que hacemos. 3. Lo que hacemos es moralmente significante. Lo que somos, no.

In school we chanted, along with our teacher, I am the Captain of my fate, I am the Master of my soul, and meanwhile, within my own body, an anarchic insurrection had been launched by one of my privates- which I was helpless to put down!

Everything dictated silence and self-control but I couldn't restrain myself and spoke my mind.

At a certain point, we're either gonna have to put away childish things and discipline ourself about how much time do I spend being passively entertained? And how much time do I spend doing stuff that actually isn't all that much fun minute by minute, but that builds certain muscles in me as a grown-up and a human being?