Quotes About Self-control

Winning the war of words involves choosing our words carefully. It is not just about the words we say, but also about the words we choose not to say.

The desire for the love of another person is not wrong, but it must not rule your heart.

Lead with your ears, follow up with your tongue, and let anger straggle along in the rear. (James 1:19)

I am very good at playing monkey games with my morality.

anger is always an issue of the heart before it is an act of physical aggression.

Love calls you to be silent when you want to speak, and to speak when you would like to be silent.

Being strong-willed is not enough, however. You also have to be hard on yourself. Someone who was strong-willed but self-indulgent would not be called determined. Determination implies your willfulness is balanced by discipline.

Never reward writing with not writing. Rewarding writing by abandoning your schedule is like rewarding yourself for quitting smoking by having a cigarette.

Writing time is for writing, not for checking e-mail, reading the news, or browsing the latest issues of journals. Sometimes I think it would be nice to download articles while writing, but I can do that at the office. The best kind of self-control is to avoid situations that require self-control.

The best kind of self-control is to avoid situations that require self-control

Put your "inner writer" back on its leash and give it a chew toy.

But hold fast. Before you become too flushed at the prospect of starring nightly in your own private pornographic films, there are limitations.

Without emotional independence, I can't have emotional sobriety.

Am I now going to mimic that person's bad attitude and make the situation worse, or am I going to be the person I want to be?

By feeling secure in my defenselessness, I am able to be my own person. I behave like a successful member of A.A., like a person who practices the Twelve Steps in all his affairs and has ceased fighting everything and everybody. I literally win by not taking the bait, by not fighting.

What would your life be like if you had the courage and wisdom to take charge? What if you made up your mind that from now on for the rest of your life, you alone would decide how you were going to feel? What kind of emotional life would you choose for yourself?

But we can make progress. With practice, a good attitude, and the help of a Higher Power, we can markedly reduce both the frequency and the duration of those periods when we allow others to determine the state of our emotions.

Only we can decide how important emotional independence and emotional sobriety are, and what we are willing to do to obtain and maintain them.

Add the fact that we so-called normal people frequently allow other people and situations to control our emotions (and thereby our thinking and behavior), and the difference between us and them begins to blur.

In my mind, people and situations "drove me to drink." Once I became sober, I had to learn to handle my emotions so these same people and situations could no longer do this to me.

Regardless of the cause of our emotional disturbances, there is always something we can do about our feelings. In fact, we are the only one who can do something about them.

When an alcoholic eliminates the allergy problem by removing the alcohol, he or she then faces the same problem as the Al-Anon member, that of not allowing others to determine how they feel.

In order to maintain their sobriety, recovering alcoholics can not afford to let others control how they feel.

They displayed more emotional independence, more emotional sobriety, more maturity. I, on the other hand, allowed a person whose actions I didn't like to control my emotional sobriety.