Quotes About Discipline

Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you're doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.

If you keep on writing for three years, every day, you should be strong. Of course, you have to be strong mentally, also. But in the first place, you have to be strong physically. That is a very important thing. Physically and mentally you have to be strong.

I spent several years acquiring the obsessive, day-to-day discipline that's needed if you want to write professionally, then several more, highly valuable years studying fiction writing at the University of Iowa.

If you want to be a singer, you've got to concentrate on it twenty-four hours a day. You can't be a well driller, too. You've got to concentrate on the business of entertaining and writing songs. Always think different from the next person. Don't ever do a song as you heard somebody else do it.

The master is bringing Darwin through to examine lower life-forms, Rhoda. Straighten your spine or you'll be mistook for a mollusk.

By constant self-discipline and self-control you can develop greatness of character.

Those who have attained things worth having in this world have worked while others idled, have persevered while others gave up in despair, have practiced the valuable habits of self-denial, industry, and singleness of purpose. As a result, they enjoy in later life the success so often erroneously attributed to good luck.

Those who have attained things worth having in this world have worked while others idled, have persevered while others gave up in despair, have practiced the valuable habits of self-denial, industry, and singleness of purpose.

Benjamin Franklin]identified thirteen virtues he wanted to cultivate--temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, chastity and humility--and made a chart with those virtues plotted against the days of the week. Each day, Franklin would score himself on whether he practiced those thirteen virtues.

I should make one healthy choice, and then stop choosing.

When it comes to fake food, I'm like Samuel Johnson, who remarked, Abstinence is as easy to me as temperance would be difficult." In other words, I can give something up altogether, but I can't indulge occasionally.

I'm not tempted by things I've decided are off-limits, but once I've started something, I have trouble stopping. If I never do something, it requires no self-control for me; if I do something sometimes, it requires enormous self-control.

Habits are the invisible architecture of daily life. We repeat about 40 percent of our behavior almost daily, so our habits shape our existence, and our future. If we change our habits, we change our lives.

Whatever liberates our spirit without giving us mastery over ourselves is destructive." And whatever liberates our spirit while giving us mastery over ourselves is constructive.

Habits make change possible by freeing us from decision making and from using self-control.

With habits, we don't make decisions, we don't use self-control, we just do the thing we want ourselves to do—or that we don't want to do.

Comedian Jerry Seinfeld advised aspiring comedian Brad Isaac that, because daily writing was the key to writing better jokes, Isaac should buy a calendar with a box for every day of the year, and every day, after writing, cross off the day with a big red X. "After a few days you'll have a chain," Seinfeld explained. "You'll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain.

One of life's small pleasures is to return something to its proper place;

once the habit is in place, we can effortlessly do the things we want to do.

the real key to habits is decision making—or, more accurately, the lack of decision making

Self-measurement brings self-awareness, and self-awareness strengthens our self-control.

To a truly remarkable extent, we're more likely to do something if it's convenient, and less likely if it's not. For this reason, we should pay close attention to the convenience of any activity we want to make into a habit.

It's a Secret of Adulthood: I give myself limits to give myself freedom.

mere acquisition isn't enough to establish a good habit