Quotes about Self-control

Decision-making takes care of goal-setting, but discipline also takes care of goal-getting. Decisions and discipline can't be separated; one is worthless without the other.

I am of a different mind ten times in the course of a day. But I resist the devil, and often it is with a fart that I chase him away. When he tempts me with silly sins I say, 'Devil, yesterday I broke wind too. Have you written it down on your list?

Therefore conquering pride, restraining riotous living, crucifying the flesh, these are great beyond all the power of men.

Hence one should follow the advice of the hermit to whom a youth complained that he rather often experienced imaginations concerned with lusts and other sins and to whom the old man replied: "You cannot prevent the birds from flying over your head. But let them only fly and do not let them build nests in the hair of your head. Let them be thoughts and remain such; but do not let them become conclusions."32

Do not bite at the bait of pleasure, till you know there is no hook beneath it.

Fence your mind against negative thoughts; build a high wall against evil ones.

It takes a good habit to replace a bad habit.

Proverbs 25:28 says, "Like a city whose walls are broken down is a man who lacks self-control." In other words, if we do not control our own lives from the inside, somebody else will control them from the outside.

The fruit of the Spirit is not spouse control or staff control or environmental control; it is self-control (see Gal. 5:23).

Mastering our emotions has nothing to do with asceticism or repression, for the purpose is not to break the emotions or deny them but to "break in" the emotions, making them teachable because they are tamed.

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.