Quotes About Self-improvement

we have complete control over our character. We are, he says, the only ones who can stop ourselves from attaining goodness and integrity.

What ailment of yours have you cured today? What failing have you resisted? Where can you show improvement?"1

the goal of the Stoics was not to banish emotion from life but to banish negative emotions.

Stoic techniques at once but to start with one technique and, having become proficient in it, go on to another. And a good technique to start with, I think, is negative visualization.

One of the most interesting developments in my practice of Stoicism has been my transformation from someone who dreaded insults into an insult connoisseur. For one thing, I have become a collector of insults: On being insulted, I analyze and categorize the insult. For another thing, I look forward to being insulted inasmuch as it affords me the opportunity to perfect my "insult game.

Marcus Aurelius approvingly quotes this advice.

Stoic philosopher Seneca, about whom I will have much to say in this book, "He who studies with a philosopher should take away with him some one good thing every day: he should daily return home a sounder man, or on the way to become sounder.

the people whose views we will examine in the following pages—have unanimously drawn the conclusion that the best way—indeed, perhaps the only way—to attain lasting happiness is not to change the world around us or our place in it but to change ourselves.

N?u anh th?c s? mu?n thoát kh?i nh?ng th? làm cho anh phi?n mu?n, ?i?u anh ?ang c?n làm không ph?i là chuy?n ??n m?t n?i khác mà là tr? thành m?t con ng??i khác

empowering thoughts

The great hope of society is in individual character.

Undoubtedly a man is to labor to better his condition, but first to better himself.

Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.

Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.

Always dream and shoot higher than you know how to. Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.

Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Do not bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.

There are times when a man should be content with what he has but never with what he is

All the athletic exercises in the world are no power to the individual unless he compel those bars and dumbbells to yield to him and strengthen muscle; the power for which he himself pays in effort.

the true competition is the competition of the individual with himself—his present seeking to excel his past.

He who comes up to his own idea of greatness must always have had a very low standard of it in mind

Never mind what others do do better than yourself, beat your own record from day to day, and you are a success.

If you want a quality, act as if you already had it.

We must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can... . The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the ore our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work

Everybody ought to do at least two things each day that he hates to do, just for practice.