Quotes About Discipline

Calm, Butler told himself. Passion is the enemy of efficiency.

If you wish to be a writer, write.

No person is free who is not master of himself.

Whoever is going to listen to the philosophers needs a considerable practice in listening.

There is a time and place for diversion and amusements, but you should never allow them to override your true purposes.

Let silence be your general rule; or say only what is necessary and in few words.

Restrict yourself to choice and refusal; and exercise them carefully, with discipline and detachment.

Adopt new habits yourself: consolidate your principles by putting them into practice.

Control thy passions lest they take vengeance on thee.

Check your passions that you may not be punished by them.

In short, we do not abandon any discipline for despair of ever being the best in it.

It is the nature of the wise to resist pleasures, but the foolish to be a slave to them.

Prefer enduring satisfaction to immediate gratification.

I cannot call somebody 'hard-working' knowing only that they read and write. Even if 'all night long' is added, I cannot say it – not until I know the focus of all this energy.

You would fain be victor at the Olympic Games, you say. Yes, but weigh the conditions, weigh the consequences; then and then only, lay to your hand-if it be for your profit. You must live by rule, submit to diet, abstain from dainty meats, exercise your body perforce at stated hours, in heat or in cold; drink no cold water, nor, it may be, wine. In a word, you must surrender yourself wholly to your trainer, as though to a physician.

All philosophy lies in two words, sustain and abstain.

at any one time, whereas the conjunctive proposition 'Both it is day and it is night' is false at any moment. 8. As you are careful … at the same time: E.g. by 'strutting' or otherwise walking in an inappropriate manner, or engaging in undignified thoughts or daydreams. 9. Don't embrace marble statues: Outdoors, naked, in cold weather: a bizarre and showy kind

If you wish to become proficient in the art of living with wisdom, do you think that you can eat and drink to excess?

One person likes tending to his farm, another to his horse; I like to daily monitor my self-improvement.

Proper preparation for the future consists of forming good personal habits.

If then you desire (aim at) such great things, remember that you must not (attempt to) lay hold of them with a small effort; but you must leave alone some things entirely, and postpone others for the present.

Because I have no natural gifts, shall I on that account give up my discipline? Far be it from me! Epictetus will not be better than Socrates, but if only I am not worse, that suffices me. For I shall not be a Milo, either, and yet I do not neglect my body, nor a Croesus, and yet I do not neglect my property, nor, in a word, is there any other field in which we give up the appropriate discipline merely from despair of attaining the highest.

When you feel burning desire for something that appears pleasureful, you are like a person under a spell. Instead of acting on impulse, take a step back—wait till the enchantment fades and you can see things as they are.

That's the kind of attitude you need to cultivate if you would be a philosopher, the sort of sentiments you should write down every day and put in practice.