Quotes about Self-control

Take yourself by the scruff of the neck and shake off your incarnate laziness.

You cannot have a moral holiday and remain moral, nor can you have a spiritual holiday and remain spiritual. God wants you to be entirely his, and this means that you have to watch to keep yourself fit. It takes a tremendous amount of time. Some of us expect to "clear the numberless ascensions"* in about two minutes.

O Lord, deliver me from this lust of always vindicating myself." Such a need for constant vindication destroys our soul's faith in God. Don't say, "I must explain myself," or, "I must get people to understand." Our Lord never explained anything—He left the misunderstandings or misconceptions of others to correct themselves.

God holds the saints responsible for emotions they do not have and ought to have, as well as for the emotions they have allowed that they ought not to have allowed.

Love is spontaneous, but it has to be maintained through discipline.

The desire for the love of another person is not wrong, but it must not rule your heart.

Lead with your ears, follow up with your tongue, and let anger straggle along in the rear. (James 1:19)

Love calls you to be silent when you want to speak, and to speak when you would like to be silent.

If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you refuse to do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires you, but you must master it.”

You are not to do as we are doing here today, where everyone does what seems right in his own eyes.

Though his face is covered with fat and his waistline bulges with flesh,

You who tear yourself in anger—should the earth be forsaken on your account, or the rocks be moved from their place?