Quotes about Self-control

A genius is simply one who has taken full possession of his own mind and directed it toward objectives of his own choosing, without permitting outside influences to discourage or mislead him.

Before you can achieve success in the higher and broader sense you must gain such thorough control over yourself that you will be a person of poise.

SERVICE, Sacrifice and Self-Control are three words which must be well understood by the person who succeeds in doing something that is of help to the world.

Intemperance. The most damaging forms of intemperance are connected with eating, strong drink, and sexual activities. Overindulgence in any of these is fatal to success.

Men who control themselves usually boss the job, no matter what it may be.

You can replace negative thoughts with positive ones, you can replace inaction with action, and you can form any habit you choose. Your thoughts are the only thing in life that you can completely control—if you choose to do so. You can control your thoughts to control your habits.

We have to learn the art of stopping — stopping our thinking, our habit energies, our forgetfulness, the strong emotions that rule us.

When angry, count to 10 before you speak. If very angry, a hundred.

No man who simply eats and drinks whenever he feels like eating and drinking, who smokes whenever he feels the urge to light a cigarette, who gratifies his curiosity and sensuality whenever they are stimulated, can consider himself a free person. He has renounced his spiritual freedom and become the servant of bodily impulse. Therefore his mind and his will are not fully his own. They are under the power of his appetites.

Coercion from outside, strong temperamental inclinations and passions within ourselves, do nothing to effect the essence of our freedom. They simply define its action by imposing certain limits on it.

People even lose their vocations because they find out that a man can spend forty or fifty or sixty years in a monastery and still have a bad temper.

Discipline is most important, and without it no serious meditation will ever be possible. But it should be one's own discipline, not a routine mechanically imposed from the outside.