Quotes about Willpower

Throughout his life, whenever he became convinced that a course of action was right, the desire to follow it had come automatically.

There is no excuse for not trying.

Have you ever noticed that if there's a hard way and an easy way, you choose the hard way every time? Why do you think that is?

The power to make and keep commitments to ourselves is the essence of developing the basic habits of effectiveness.

Level 5 leaders display a paradoxical combination of personal humility and professional will, channelling their energy, drive, creativity and discipline in to something larger and more enduring than themselves.

As we clearly identify our values and proactively organize and execute around those values on a daily basis, we develop self-awareness and independent will by making and keeping meaningful promises and commitments.

if you are an effective manager of yourself, your discipline comes from within; it is a function of your independent will. You are a disciple, a follower, of your own deep values and their source. And you have the will, the integrity, to subordinate your feelings, your impulses, your moods to those values.

Only when you have the self-awareness to examine your program—and the imagination and conscience to create a new, unique, principle-centered program to which you can say "yes"—only then will you have sufficient independent will power to say "no," with a genuine smile, to the unimportant.

Our secret life is where we are able to tap into the power of the four human endowments: self-awareness, conscience, imagination, and independent will.

The degree to which we have developed our independent will in our everyday lives is measured by our personal integrity. Integrity is, fundamentally, the value we place on ourselves. It's our ability to make and keep commitments to ourselves, to "walk our talk." It's honor with self, a fundamental part of the Character Ethic, the essence of proactive growth.

It also requires independent will, the power to do something when you don't want to do it, to be a function of your values rather than a function of the impulse or desire of any given moment.

Self discipline is that which, next to virtue, truly and essentially raises one man above another.