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Quotes about discipline
Older writers had less to say about willpower as a talent and more about habit as a form of training. Stoic teachers compared their students to athletes. William James told teachers that early, repeated action sets the groove a person later runs in.
The Victorian self-help authors added thrift and punctuality, and could get preachy about it. Take what's useful. Some of their lines have aged better than their opinions.
From the books
Checked word for word against public-domain editions.
The will can be educated.
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Success in life is dependent largely upon the willpower, and whatever weakens or impairs it diminishes success. The will can be educated. That which most easily becomes a habit in us is the will. Learn, then, to will decisively and strongly; thus fix your floating life, and leave it no longer to be carried hither and thither, like a withered leaf, by every wind that blows. "It is not talent that men lack, it is the will to labor; it is the purpose, not the power to produce."
We forget that every good that is worth possessing must be paid for in strokes of daily effort.
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… and to absorb a lot of it, of course. I fully intend to keep up my love of music, to read the books that shall give new turns to the thought of my time, to keep my higher spiritual side alive, etc." But we do not attack these things concretely, and we do not begin to-day. We forget that every good that is worth possessing must be paid for in strokes of daily effort. We postpone and postpone, until those smiling possibilities are dead. Whereas ten minutes a day of poetry, of spiritual reading or meditation, and an hour or two a week at music, pictures, or philosophy, provided we began now and suffered no remission, would infallibly give us …
Give me a man who cares how he shall do anything, not for the obtaining of a thing, but who cares about his own energy.
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… given to you nothing in the present case? Has he not given to you endurance? Has he not given to you magnanimity? Has he not given to you manliness? When you have such hands do you still look for one who shall wipe your nose? But we neither study these things nor care for them. Give me a man who cares how he shall do anything, not for the obtaining of a thing, but who cares about his own energy. What man, when he is walking about, cares for his own energy? Who, when he is deliberating, cares about his own deliberation, and not about obtaining that about which he deliberates? And if he succeeds, he is elated and says, How well we have deliberated; did I not tell you, …
Beware of the anger of the mind, and control thy mind!
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Beware of the anger of the mind, and control thy mind! Leave the sins of the mind, and practise virtue with thy mind!
If you would improve, submit to be considered without sense and foolish with respect to externals.
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If you would improve, submit to be considered without sense and foolish with respect to externals. Wish to be considered to know nothing; and if you shall seem to some to be a person of importance, distrust yourself. For you should know that it is not easy both to keep your will in a condition conformable to nature and (to secure) external things: but if a man is careful about the one, it is an absolute necessity that he will neglect the other.
Want of forbearance in small matters confounds great plans.
Forbearance and self-control smooth the road of life, and open many ways which would otherwise remain closed.
The good purpose once formed must be carried out with alacrity and without swerving.
Employ the same means, and the same results will follow.
If you leave a white post alone it will soon be a black post.
The habit of conquering ourselves is the habit of victory; it strengthens all the faculties.
Strong impulses are but another name for energy.
Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me.
Rouse thyself! do not be idle!
The law of nature is, Do the thing, and you shall have the Power; but they who do not the thing have not the power.
Only that day dawns to which we are awake.
Let a man give the reins to his impulses and passions, and from that moment he yields up his moral freedom.
If you do not use the tools, they use you.
What a good thing it is to be able to command one’s temper!
The characteristic of heroism is its persistency.
Every act of will is an act of self-limitation.
Let us say then frankly that the education of the will is the object of our existence.
Morning brings back the heroic ages.
Every man who has ever achieved grandly has been a stern schoolmaster to himself.
Can heights be reached by a level path?
Self-control is the generalship which turns a mob of raw recruits into a disciplined army.
A ship without ballast is unstable and will not go straight.
Verily the lust for comfort murders the passion of the soul, and then walks grinning in the funeral.
Idleness eats the heart out of men as of nations, and consumes them as rust does iron.
Step by step we scale this mysterious ladder: the steps are actions; the new prospect is power.
Do not grow weary, perform your duty, and act as becomes a good man.
Is there any hard-working man to whom idleness is not a punishment?
How use doth breed a habit in a man!
In a word, you must surrender yourself to the trainer, as you do to a physician.
Perfect victory is the triumph over oneself.
Practise thyself even in the things which thou despairest of accomplishing.
Popular sayings
Widely repeated lines with no name attached, because nobody can honestly put one on them.
Persistence is the key to success.
Perseverance is not a long race; it is many short races one after another.
Nobody will work harder for you than you.
Stop wishing, start doing.
The best way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.
Bite the bullet.
Mind over matter.
Keep showing up.
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