Quotes About Self-control

At the New York Athletic Club they serve amazing food. People go there, get healthy, and then eat themselves to death - which is, I suppose, the right way to do it.

I'm only drinking white wine because I'm on a diet and I don't eat.

The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins.

Ashikaga Takauji41 had an evil reputation as a traitor, but it is said that he sat zazen for some time every night and never failed to engage in this daily practice even when he became intoxicated. I think this should be a lesson to students of Zen.

Never complain about what you permit to be.

A person either disciplines his finances or his finances disciplines him.

Bad habits: easy to develop and hard to live with. Good habits: hard to develop and easy to live with.

Discipline is a given; the choice is whether it is applied internally or externally.

The story is told of Socrates walking through the market in Athens, with its groaning abundance of options, and saying to himself, "Who would have thought that there could be so many things that I can do without?"4

For at the heart of freedom lies a grand paradox: the greatest enemy of freedom is freedom.

Mastering our emotions has nothing to do with asceticism or repression, for the purpose is not to break the emotions or deny them but to "break in" the emotions, making them teachable because they are tamed.

There are certain things we must not pray about - moods, for instance. Moods never go by praying, moods go by kicking.

Take yourself by the scruff of the neck and shake off your incarnate laziness.

You cannot have a moral holiday and remain moral, nor can you have a spiritual holiday and remain spiritual. God wants you to be entirely his, and this means that you have to watch to keep yourself fit. It takes a tremendous amount of time. Some of us expect to "clear the numberless ascensions"* in about two minutes.

O Lord, deliver me from this lust of always vindicating myself." Such a need for constant vindication destroys our soul's faith in God. Don't say, "I must explain myself," or, "I must get people to understand." Our Lord never explained anything—He left the misunderstandings or misconceptions of others to correct themselves.

God's grace produces men and women with a strong family likeness to Jesus Christ, not pampered, spoiled weaklings. It takes a tremendous amount of discipline to live the worthy and excellent life of a disciple of Jesus in the realities of life. And it is always necessary for us to make an effort to live a life of worth and excellence.

It is not on what we spend the greatest amount of time that molds us the most, but whatever exerts the most power over us. We must make a determination to limit and concentrate our desires and interests on the atonement by the Cross of Christ.

If we do not sacrifice the natural to the spiritual, the natural life will resist and defy the life of the Son of God in us and will produce continual turmoil. This is always the result of an undisciplined spiritual nature. We go wrong because we stubbornly refuse to discipline ourselves physically, morally, or mentally.

God holds the saints responsible for emotions they do not have and ought to have, as well as for the emotions they have allowed that they ought not to have allowed.

At first, Jesus Christ through His Spirit has to restrain you from doing a great many things that may be perfectly right for everyone else but not right for you. Yet, see that you don't use your restrictions to criticize someone else.

Love is spontaneous, but it has to be maintained through discipline.

All the great successes of statesmanlike art and clever popular instincts were the result of cool contemplation, long silence and waiting, hard self-control and, above all, a fundamental renunciation of intoxication and and spectacles.

O God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains!

Animalism," forsooth!—a more unfair word don't exist. When we animals never drink except just enough to satisfy thirst, never eat except when wo have genuine appetites, never indulge in any sort of debauch, and never strain excess till we sink into the slough of satiety, shall "animalism" be a word to designate all that men and women dare to do? "Animalism!" you ought to blush for such a libel on our innocent and reasonable lives when you regard your own