"Self-discipline" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... it would not be an act conducive to the welfare of the community; it might indeed be a very selfish and cowardly act. True morality involves the duty of self-formation and the exercise of judgment and self-discipline in order that the individual life may become as great a gift as possible to the common life. It will therefore be seen at once that there is a vital relation between morality and religion; the one implies the other even though the fact may not always be recognised, ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... gives these gifts, and compels man to use them. Man is as much the slave as the master of the machine, as he turns to the telephone or the telegram. In this fierce turmoil of the modern world he can only keep his judgment intact, his nerves sound, and his mind secure by the process of self-discipline, which may be equally defined as restraint, control, or moderation. This is the price which must be paid for the ...
— Success (Second Edition) • Max Aitken Beaverbrook
... physical vigor is the condition of a great career. Stonewall Jackson, early in life, determined to conquer every weakness he had, physical, mental, and moral. He held all of his powers with a firm hand. To his great self-discipline and self-mastery he owed his success. So determined was he to harden himself to the weather that he could not be induced to wear an overcoat in winter. "I will not give in to the cold," he said. For a year, on account of dyspepsia, he lived on buttermilk and stale bread, and wore a wet ...
— An Iron Will • Orison Swett Marden
... lady accords to another, ignoring the impertinence. I took pains to say "please" and "thank you." Many a time I bit my lips tightly against my own rising rage, and afterward in calmness recognised a superior opportunity for self-discipline. ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... his heead. 'Nay, lad,' he said, 'we haven't gotten no 'isms i' heaven. We've gotten shut o' all that sort o' thing. There's no argifying i' heaven. There's plenty o' discipline, but it's what we call self-discipline; an' I reckon that's t' only sort o' discipline that's ...
— Tales of the Ridings • F. W. Moorman
... is entirely impulsive, and every impulse is an inspiration. She leaves the castle of the Giants as soon as it occurs to her to do so, and the perfect submission to her impulse indicates the power and depth of her nature. Therefore, too, though she seems always right, she is free from all self-discipline. In meeting her one should not feel especially that she was a good person. She is not virtuous, for she has no moral struggle; nor pious, for she is too impersonal; and even her love, at least to the end of "Consuelo," is not a life. Her ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... secondary course four years more, and leading the boys and girls up to the study of benevolence, their duty to ancestors, to other people's property, other people's honor, other people's freedom, and, finally, to self-discipline, modesty, dignity, dress, labor, the treatment of animals, and the due relations of men and women, both of whom are to be regarded equally as "lords" of creation. From end to end of the long course of training, behavior rather ...
— The Girl Wanted • Nixon Waterman
... in any sense of the word a bad woman. She was merely beautiful and irresponsible—a typical cigale of the stage—lovable and kind-hearted and pagan, and possessing but the haziest notions of self-control and self-discipline. Even so, left to themselves, husband and wife might ultimately have found the road to happiness across the bridge of their great love ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... the ceremony was progressing in the dim recesses of the choir, and the surprise and dishonor this unexpected denouement brought upon the home were nothing to the unhappiness in store for the childish bride, whose latest and wildest freak brought neither wisdom for self-discipline nor power to endure that relentless criticism which ceased only when a little one lay in the place of the child-mother, who had been too weak to cope with the worries of the year that had followed upon that unhappy ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... who had intentionally and even maliciously injured him, but he seems at times to have gone out of his way to do them a service. This is, perhaps, his greatest distinction. Lincoln's magnanimity is the final proof of the completeness of his self-discipline. The quality of being magnanimous is both the consummate virtue and the one which is least natural. It was certainly far from being natural among Lincoln's own people. Americans of his time were generally of the opinion that it was dishonorable ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... trouble and keep your grin, But have you tackled self-discipline? Have you ever issued commands to you To quit the things that you like to do, And then, when tempted and sorely swayed, Those ...
— Just Folks • Edgar A. Guest
... report that he went at it with determination, self-discipline, and system, following instructions to the letter ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... Is all this properly understood? Every essential to the beginning of the work was ready:—and the most essential, it cannot be said too often, are methods, and also the most difficult to develop, and the longest opposed by habit and laziness. What we have today reconquered, with unspeakable self-discipline, for ourselves—for certain bad instincts, certain Christian instincts, still lurk in our bodies—that is to say, the keen eye for reality, the cautious hand, patience and seriousness in the smallest things, the ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... yet unable to do without religion, he set down the list of virtues which he thought might be of benefit to himself and at the same time of service to his fellows; qualities which all the sects might unite in proclaiming good, and which any man might easily acquire by a little persistence in self-discipline. Aiming to become himself "completely virtuous," he dreamed of some day formulating the universal principles of the "Art of Virtue," and of uniting all good men throughout the world in a society for promoting the practice of it. And what was this Art of Virtue but a socialized ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... had heard something from Dale that rendered it eminently necessary that neither he nor Cynthia should be seen in Hereford on the Sunday. Probably, too, she did not anticipate that Cynthia would don the haircloth of self-discipline and avoid him during the whole of the day, since that was what the girl meant by ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... her hand patiently. She was accustomed to be put to rights. It was characteristic at once of her dreaminess and her powers of self-discipline that she was fairly orderly, though she had great difficulty in being so. Without a constant struggle, she would have had loose plaits and hanging strings about her always. Lucy's trimness was a perpetual marvel to her. It was like the contrast between the soft ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... could to discover some means to immortality to remove the sufferings of men. He made his "Great Renunciation" when he was twenty-nine years old. He travelled on foot to Rajag@rha (Rajgir) and thence to Uruvela, where in company with other five ascetics he entered upon a course of extreme self-discipline, carrying his austerities to such a length that his body became utterly emaciated and he fell down senseless and was believed to be dead. After six years of this great struggle he was convinced that the truth was not to be won by the way of extreme asceticism, and resuming ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... no worshipper of Washington. But in the hand of that man of strong brain and powerful passions once lay the destiny of the New World,—in a sense, human destiny. But for his possession of the humility and self-discipline underlying his Rules of Civility, the ambitious politicians of the United States might to-day be popularly held to a much lower standard. The tone of his character was so entirely that of modesty, he was so fundamentally patriotic, that even his faults ...
— George Washington's Rules of Civility - Traced to their Sources and Restored by Moncure D. Conway • Moncure D. Conway
... to say, prevent me from returning good for evil to the best of my ability, by complying with his request as readily and respectfully as ever. It cost me a struggle with that fallen nature, which we all share in common, before I could suppress my feelings. Being accustomed to self-discipline, ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... bursts of uncontrollable anger, generally followed by periods of black depression and almost absolute silence,[44] Baker was the very reverse. Partly by natural temperament, but also certainly by severe self-discipline, his manner was invincibly placid and his temper imperturbable.[45] Yet none was more tenacious in ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... undiscouraged by odds and sometimes by ill-success, has brought to the weariness and disappointment of old age an increasing gentleness and kindliness of spirit, which is one of the rarest tokens and rewards of patient and genuine self-discipline. A man who has set himself steadily and undismayed to stem and bring to reason the two most powerful currents of conviction and feeling which have agitated his times, leaves an impressive example of zeal and fearlessness, ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... society of the future purchase its comforts at the cost of its character? Clearly not if the must in the case is interpreted literally. A low birth rate may be secured, not at the cost of virtue, but by a self-discipline that is quite in harmony with virtue and is certain to give to it a virile character which it loses when men put little restraint on their impulses. Late marriages for men stand as the legitimate effect of the desire to sustain a high standard of living and to transmit it to ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark
... slowly and painfully built up around us a fabric of defence against barbarism, the work of the non-ethical man. This debt we are bound to repay by furthering in ourselves the good work of human fellowship, and by striving to improve the conditions of our social life; and the means thereto are self-discipline, self-support, intelligent effort, not unreasoning violence with its disruption of ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... majesty. The goal of the religious life is personal communion with Him, the intuitive apprehension and spontaneous acceptance of His will, the Beatific Vision of His excellencies. But this state of blessedness cannot be reached by mere self-discipline; the prayers, the meditations, the good works of the isolated and uninstructed individual, can only serve to condone a state of irremediable ignorance. The avenue to knowledge of Him lies through faith; and faith means the unquestioning acceptance of ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... should be promoted to the woolsack; beyond all, with a social status that should place him above the scuffle of provincial and unprofessional annoyances; but he forced himself to take life as it came, and he suffocated his longings with grim self-discipline, by mere force of will. Of the four men, Dana was the most marked. Without dogmatism or self-assertion, he seemed always to be fully in sight, a figure that completely filled a well-defined space. He, too, talked well, and his mind worked close to its subject, as a ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... Stephen's estimation his friend had noble qualities, and in bearing testimony to them he was beginning his chapter of self-discipline. In this interview, at least, he had preserved a conscience void of offense, and he hastened to say goodnight before any temptation should assail his discretion. Perhaps, also—for he was but mortal—the reflection ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... habitually "go into hysterics", are merely grown-up "spoiled children", and in all cases, the basic factor is a lack of control and self-discipline. ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... in economic development, crushing the impulses and evading the complications that arise out of sex and flying to devotions and simple duties in nunneries and monasteries; we have people cutting their lives down to a vegetarian dietary and scientific research, resorting to excesses of self-discipline, giving themselves up wholly to some "art" and making everything else subordinate to that, or, going in another direction, abandoning pride and love in favour of an acquired ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... undisciplined teachers and parents, who avenge themselves in excesses of passion or fatigue or disgust,—blows which are simply the active expression of a tension of nerves, a detestable evidence of the want of self-discipline and selfculture. Still less do I refer to the cruelties committed by monsters, sexual perverts, whose brutal tendencies are stimulated by their disciplinary power and who use it to force their victims to silence, as ...
— The Education of the Child • Ellen Key
... absolute in integrity and adjusted perfectly to other men. In between these wholly contrasting elements was the group majority, trying to do duty, with varying degrees of success. That would include Greeley, strong in self-discipline but likewise brittle. It would include Lieutenant Lockwood, a lion among men for most of the distance, but totally downcast and beaten in the last dreadful stretch, Israel, the youngest of the party who won the love of other ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... agency, such as public religion, assumes protection of the most searching social maxims and lends to them the weight of all time, all space, all wonder, and all fear. For many centuries religion held within itself the ripening self-knowledge and self-discipline of the human mind. Now, beside this original agency we have its offshoots, politics, education, legislation, the penal art. And the philosophical sciences, including psychology and ethics, are the especial servants ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... painful which even appears to throw doubt upon the most sublime event that has happened in human history. How little does all that has been written above touch the real question at issue, yet, what self-discipline and mental training is required before we learn to distinguish the essential ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... feature of modern life; but since it has dawned upon our minds that adult members of a family need not necessarily live together if they prefer to live apart, the strain of domesticity has been reduced to the limits of endurance. We have gained in serenity what we have lost in self-discipline by this easy achievement of an independence which, fifty years ago, would have been deemed pure licence. I can remember that, when I was a little girl, two of our neighbours, a widowed mother and a widowed daughter, scandalized all their friends by living in two large ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... in nothing. The Bible does him as direct a service in rebuke and guidance as if every sentence in it had been written for himself. It is interesting to note that the quotations from it are from a version that preceded our own. His rules of self-discipline and spiritual culture, while wholly free from unwholesome asceticism, nevertheless required the curbing of all desires, and the utter subjection of every natural prompting to a crucial test, before its innocent or edifying character could ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... the reverse—acting deeds against his nature by the strong force of principle and will. In Portia there is the same profound and passionate feeling, and all her sex's softness and timidity, held in check by that self-discipline, that stately dignity, which she thought became a woman "so fathered and so husbanded." The fact of her inflicting on herself a voluntary wound to try her own fortitude, is perhaps the strongest proof of this disposition. Plutarch ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... are really ten, or twenty, years older than he is in certain directions, and you must lecture him accordingly. Be firm; be decisive. Explain to him that life is real and that he must approach it with the same degree of earnestness and self-discipline as he devotes to running and playing games and the like. I feel sure you will carry great weight. He is far from being a fool. In fact he is a very intelligent young man with excellent brains, and if he would devote them to the ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... Aurora did not recognize as such, but yet her mind as she was practicing self-discipline turned, without seeking for the reason, toward the person who had done most to inculcate in her the doctrine that if you like to do a thing that itself is almost surely a sign of the thing being wicked, and that if you dislike it it is very ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... foods that, unfortunately, I was allergic to, if I would reduce my alcohol intake greatly and take some food supplements, then gradually my symptoms would abate. With the persistent application of a little self-discipline over several months, maybe six months, I could feel really well again almost all the time and would probably continue that way for many years to come. This was good news, though the need to apply personal responsibility ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon
... language. If you say what your opinion is, you should take care to be beautiful but unintelligible. Commit yourself to nothing. Words were given us to conceal our thoughts, and with a little practice and self-discipline will conceal them even from ourselves. A candid friend once complained to me that in my translation from the Greek it was sometimes impossible for him to know which of two different lectiones I was translating. As a matter of fact, though I did not tell him this, I did not know either. Especially ...
— Marge Askinforit • Barry Pain
... workingmen of the world to unite, that they had "nothing but their chains to lose and the world to gain." Cohesion of any sort, united and voluntary organization, as events have proved, is impossible in populations bereft of intelligence, self-discipline and even the material necessities of life, and cheated by their desires and ignorance into unrestrained and ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... Vicar's wife—a refined, shy little woman, somewhat austere in self-discipline and her own devotional exercises, but incapable of harsh judgment upon any other living soul—had spent Bank Holiday in writing letters and addressing them (from a list drawn up in long consultation with her husband) to "women-workers" of all denominations in the parish, inviting them ...
— Nicky-Nan, Reservist • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... expression; the method of expression hovering between form and illusory improvisation—all this we find again in the strongest individualists, in Heine, in Annette von Droste, in Lenau. The Weimar period, however, when the poet by means of a great and severe self-discipline trains himself to the point of rigidity in order to become the instrument of his art—that period is, with Tasso, paving the way for the school of Grillparzer, while that infinite deepening of the poetic calling ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... as gay, as unconcerned, as if she had not just been sounding the depths of terrible memories. I paid a silent tribute to her powers of self-discipline before ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... extermination in this war ground the lesson into their unwilling souls. It may be lamentable that humanity should still be held so firmly in the grip of biologic law that it must kill and be killed in order to save itself, but there are things worse than death. Until humanity learns the secret of self-discipline it will create diseases that can be eradicated only with the knife; it is merely blind to assume that the insanity of war can be prevented by any system of parliamenting, or litigation, or paper schemes of international arbitration. Some issues are ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... meets with will depend upon his constitution, inheritance, environment and education. I do not mean by education, school or book education; I mean intuition—that knowledge which evolves from home life and habits. I mean, has he any self-discipline? Does he know anything about self-denial? Has he any conception of a control higher than impulse? Has he been brought up to know that there is a limit to the gratifying of wants and desires beyond which, if he goes, he must make good with laws that are as exacting as they are invariable? Does ...
— Appendicitis: The Etiology, Hygenic and Dietetic Treatment • John H. Tilden, M.D.
... closing, let me remind you, gentlemen, that woman has not been a heedless spectator of all the great events of the century, nor a dull listener to the grand debates on human freedom and equality. She has learned the lesson of self-sacrifice, self-discipline, and self-government in the same school with the ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... the background, engaged in no more terrific act of violence toward St. Anthony, than endeavoring to pull off his mantle; he has, however, a scourge over his shoulder, but this is probably intended for St. Anthony's weapon of self-discipline, which the fiend, with a very Protestant turn of mind, is carrying off. A broken staff, with a bell hanging to it, at the saint's feet, also expresses his interrupted devotion. The three other figures beside him are bent on more cunning mischief: the woman on the left is one of Tintoret's best ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... It was the self-discipline of a man who had never looked upon war until he was forty, that enabled Oliver Cromwell to create an army which never fought without victory, yet which retired into the ranks of industry as soon as the government was established, each soldier being distinguished from ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... it than by saying that he, perhaps, of all men of this generation, came nearest to the mould and ideal of manhood, which every English father would like to see his son aspire to, and, if possible, to attain. The bounty of nature, enriched and developed not only by early training, but by constant self-discipline through life, blended in him gifts and graces which, taken alone, are rare, and in such attractive union are rarer still. Body, mind and character, the schoolroom, the cricket field, the Bar, the House of Commons—each ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... he step forth and show himself to her? His pride called loudly to him: "Now she will speak your name; you are the chosen one of the fairest and noblest." But another voice to which he had accustomed himself to listen in severe self-discipline made itself heard, and said—"Let her say nothing in ignorance, that she need be ashamed ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... value of the Cirripede monograph lies not merely in the fact that it is a very admirable piece of work, and constituted a great addition to positive knowledge, but still more in the circumstance that it was a piece of critical self-discipline, the effect of which manifested itself in everything your father wrote afterwards, and saved him ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... evolution he will simply tell the people whatever may have been given him in the same hour to say. This does not mean that indolence will supersede industry. Through the indolent man God sends no messages. The true prophet will always be preparing himself. By learning, by meditation, by self-discipline, the true prophet will prepare his heart for the incoming of the Eternal Spirit, and the glory of Heaven will be as a fire on the altar of the honest heart. Art preachers we have had in too great abundance. ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various
... to read upstairs; there's the sound of a steady hum. Yes, it's Sunday today, and she, being the best educated of them, naturally reads the service. Bravo! Magnificent! She has extended her self-discipline even to this, for they are all orthodox Christians in this neighborhood. Believing? No, but not hostile, either. One reads Scripture. Rather a clever ruse, that of ...
— Look Back on Happiness • Knut Hamsun
... return of the man to his job, and the fluctuations of employment, the failure of the employing class to provide any alternative to idleness during slack time, break that habit of industry. And then, last but not least, there is self-respect. Men and women are capable of wonders of self-discipline and effort if they feel that theirs is a meritorious service, if they imagine the thing they are doing is the thing they ought to do. A miner will cut coal in a different spirit and with a fading zest if he knows his day's output is to be burnt to waste secretly by a lunatic. ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... example, or to the outward expression of an anger-fit, will result for the moment in making the inner grief or anger more acutely felt. There is, accordingly, no better known or more generally useful precept in the moral training of youth, or in one's personal self-discipline, than that which bids us pay primary attention to what we do and express, and not to care too much for what we feel. If we only check a cowardly impulse in time, for example, or if we only don't strike the blow or rip out with ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent
... I can," he answered. "Your trouble lies in having the wrong friends and in lack of self-discipline. If you were my sister, I'd take you away for a fortnight and put you on the road ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... injury which must be feared if the social community indulges in such habits of undisciplined, passionate expression needs no explaining. The mind is a unit: it cannot be without self-control in one department and under the desirable self-discipline of the will in another. A period in which the mad rush of dancing stirs social life must be unfavourable to the development of thorough training and earnest endeavour. The fate of imperial Rome ought to be the eternal warning to imperial Manhattan. Italy, like America, took its art ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... Franciscan Order, Mr Adderley opens his narrative with an admirable sketch of the history of Monasticism in Europe, which is certainly the best thing in the book. He distinguishes clearly and fairly between the Manichaean ideal that underlies so much of Eastern Monasticism and the ideal of self-discipline which never wholly vanished from the Christian form. But he does not throw any light on what must be for the outsider the absorbing problem of this Catholic asceticism, for the excellent reason that not being an outsider he does not find ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... to show that Mandeville's doctrine was "in accord with a great body of contemporary theory,"[12] while accepting it as "the code of rigorism" treats it as if it were identical with any moral system calling for any measure of self-discipline or associated with any type of religious-mindedness.[13] He also identifies it with rationalism in ethics as such, as if any rationalistic ethics, merely because it calls for some measure of discipline of the passions by "reason," is ipso ...
— A Letter to Dion • Bernard Mandeville
... of this country found the courage and the strength, the self-discipline, and the mutual respect to fight and to win, with the help of our allies, under God. I doubt if the tasks of the future are more difficult. But if they are, then I say that our strength and our knowledge and our understanding will ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... condition of humanity is that of thirst. Christ speaks in my text as if that thirst was by no means universal, and, alas! it is not, 'If any man thirst'; there are some of us that do not, for we are all so constituted that, unless by continual self-discipline, and self-suppression, and self-evolution, the lower desires will overgrow the loftier ones, and kill them, as weeds will some precious crop. And some of you are so much taken up with gratifying the lowest necessities and longings of your nature, that you leave the highest all uncared ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... ruling principle, which both impelled him to become all things to all men, with a view to their salvation, as he has been saying, and urged him to effort and self-discipline, with a view to his own, as he goes on to say. 'For the Gospel's sake' seems to point backward; 'that I may be a joint partaker thereof points forward. We have not only to preach the Gospel to others, but to live on it and be saved by ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... therein, though our souls were as scarlet, they shall become white as snow. We have the right to a certain optimism about ourselves if it be founded on actual spiritual activity which ceaselessly tries to reproduce the Christ-experience in us, even the experience of the Passion by the voluntary self-discipline to which we subject ourselves. A brilliant writer has spoken of those whose view of their lives is drawn from "that fountain of all optimism—sloth." That is a true saying: our optimism is often no more than an idle refusal to face facts; a quaint ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... greatest of democracies. Yet where men are acutely conscious of vital differences of opinion, only the hourly practice of self-control can prevent clashing. Neither Douglas nor his opponents were prepared to undergo any such rigid self-discipline. ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... rugged fantastic limbs towering high above the neighbouring trees. So he made straight for it at once. Amos was no coward, though naturally of a timid disposition; for he had patiently acquired habits of self-control, learned partly in the school of chastisement, and partly in the school of self-discipline. And yet it was not without a feeling of shrinking and misgiving that he saw a man approaching the oak from a path opposite to that by which he himself had come. Trees, mingled with thick brushwood, covered the ground on all sides, except ...
— Amos Huntingdon • T.P. Wilson
... wistfully, but he was trained to self-discipline, and he asked no more; and Michael went back ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... she could think of nothing to say that could comfort Mrs. Sefton; she was evidently reaping the effects of her own injudicious weakness. She had not taught her child to practice self-discipline and self-control. Her waywardness had been fostered by indulgence, and her temper had become more faulty. "What man is there of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone?" asked the Divine Teacher; ...
— Our Bessie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... his pride that he was unemotional. By rigid self-discipline, he had wholly mastered himself. His detachment from his kind was at first spasmodic, then exceptionally complete. Excepting Ralph, his relation to the world was that of an unimpassioned critic. ...
— A Spinner in the Sun • Myrtle Reed
... for the son being a part or portion of the father, he is correcting his own self only; and the proof of it is, that a father, in punishing his own son, feels as much pain in so doing as if he were himself punished. It is, therefore, nothing but self-discipline, which is strictly enjoined us ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Captain Frederick Marryat
... tragedy of his life. It is as depressing as one of his own morbid, fantastic tales. His career leaves a painful sense of incompleteness and loss. With greater self-discipline, how much more he might have accomplished for himself and for others! Gifted, self-willed, proud, passionate, with meager moral sense, he forfeited success by his perversity and his vices. From his own character and ...
— Poets of the South • F.V.N. Painter
... perhaps permissible to differ from the moral theology of Borne in holding that it is not essential to impose a penance at all, while recognizing the value in most cases of suggesting some definite act of self-discipline or observance, of a kind adapted to the penitent's circumstances and needs). The confessor is, of course, bound in the strictest way not to reveal anything said to him in confession, or to broach the subject again to the penitent without the latter's express permission, or to allow his subsequent ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... or rhetoric, without parade or pretence, he spoke straight to the point. If any came expecting the turgid eloquence or the ribaldry of the frontier, they must have been startled at the earnest and sincere purity of his utterances. It was marvellous to see how this untutored man, by mere self-discipline and the chastening of his own spirit, had outgrown all meretricious arts, and found his own way to the grandeur ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... hermits; the anchorites of the Middle Ages retained the solitary life, but were very unlike the crazy savages of the Thebaid. In modern times, those who have been most under the Greek spirit have generally lived with austere simplicity, but without any of the violent self-discipline which is said to be still practised by some devout Catholics. The assiduous practice of self-mastery and the most sparing indulgence in the pleasures of sense are the 'philosophic life' which the Greek spirit recommends as the highest. The best Greeks ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... thinking to ask you. I was declaring a six months' course in self-discipline for the good ...
— Claire - The Blind Love of a Blind Hero, By a Blind Author • Leslie Burton Blades
... Dimitri began to unfold to me his plans for marriage, for a life in the country, and for continual self-discipline. ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... describe to you the rage of conformity that possessed me. Poetry, ideas—all the picture-making processes stopped. A kind of dull self-discipline seemed to me the only exercise worthy of a reflecting mind. I had to justify my great refusal, and I tried to do it by plunging myself up to the eyes into the very conditions I had been instinctively struggling to get away from. The only ...
— The Long Run - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... Mother was brought to see that pigeons and white rats and a tame coon and indeed everything that came his way, was a boy's right to have. The Major was educating Bill in the knowledge of how to care for dumb animals: he was learning the secret of self-discipline and self-control, without which no man or woman or boy or girl is fit to be the owner ...
— Battling the Clouds - or, For a Comrade's Honor • Captain Frank Cobb
... all, no radical change might be necessary. It might be enough that by effort, and self-discipline, and direction of the thoughts, we gradually overcome our evil habits and tendencies; but when we resolve to do so, and make the effort, we meet with an unexpected resistance. "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." "I find a law ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... settled himself in an armchair, read his other letters deliberately, and glanced at the headlines of the papers, before he carefully slit the envelope that had seemed to press his eyeballs. The time had come for self-discipline, consistently exercised. Moreover, he was afraid of it. What—why had she written to him? Why hadn't she telephoned? Was this a tardy dismissal? His breath was short and his hands shaking as he ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... now at my Wimblehurst days, I still find myself surprised at the amount of steady grinding study, of strenuous self-discipline that I maintained throughout my apprenticeship. In many ways I think that time was the most honourable period in my life. I wish I could say with a certain mind that my motives in working so well were large and honourable too. ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... susceptibility to the influence of others' moods; he did so to-day, when having gone to Mrs. Borisoff in an unusually cheerful frame of mind, he came away languid and despondent. But his scheme of life permitted no such idle brooding as used to waste his days; self-discipline sent him to his work, as usual, through the afternoon, and in the evening ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... least on amiable terms must be held as much as could be hoped for. With regard to Mary's efficiency as a teacher, his opinion had grown more favourable since he had seen her in her own home. Time and experience were moulding her, he thought, to a task undertaken first of all in a spirit of self-discipline. She appeared to be successful in winning the confidence of parents, and she no longer complained of inability to make herself liked by her little pupils. Best of all, she was undoubtedly devoting herself to the work with all the ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... education is to make the nervous system the ally, not the enemy. For this we must make automatic and habitual as many useful actions as we can and carefully guard against growing into ways which are likely to be disadvantageous." His advice for self-discipline is to "seize every first possible opportunity to act on any resolution made, and on every emotional prompting in the direction of habits one aspires to gain." Professor Thompson, in his book on Brain and Personality, says, "We can make our own ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... take part in any family quarrel, or personal broil, of any description whatsoever. His conduct in this respect was the result of self-discipline, and did not proceed from any want of sensibility. "He is very sensitive," said his sister Margaret, "and remembers long, as well as feels deeply, anything in the form of slight." Indeed, at college his friends used to tell him that his leading qualities were "generosity and vindictiveness." ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... thought mortified and holy'; and then he was obsessed by the still bitterer feelings of ineradicable disappointment and regret. He had lost a great opportunity, and it brought him small comfort to consider that 'in the region of counsels, self-chastisement, humiliation, self-discipline, penance, and of the Cross', ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... words: "But see, the morn in russet mantle clad, Walks o'er the dew of yon high eastern hill" was nearer to the oriental spirit than we are. We have lost Shakespeare's instinct for nature and for fresh individual vision, and we are unwilling to acquire it through self-discipline. If we do not want art to disappear under the froth of shallow egotism, we must learn the lesson ...
— Japanese Prints • John Gould Fletcher
... this ancient race, which has lived so long, done so much, and suffered so much, bore its martyrdom. By such an exercise of self-discipline it defied the Powers of Civilisation to do their worst. In spite of the licence given to brute force, in spite of the removal of the machinery of civil control, in spite of the internment of the army and its arms, in spite of the ostentatiously ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... knowledge in debate? Certainly not. He reviewed this study to stiffen the back-bone of his power of Attention. And he possessed this power in an extraordinary degree by nature. I am not suggesting any such severe course of self-discipline. But if the pupil whose attention was formerly weak will never allow a date to come before him without fixing it in mind by my method, and if he will also occasionally learn by heart a passage of prose or poetry by my assimilating methods, he will train his Attention ...
— Assimilative Memory - or, How to Attend and Never Forget • Marcus Dwight Larrowe (AKA Prof. A. Loisette)
... is more life in one "self-approving hour,"-one act of benevolence,—one work of self-discipline,—than in threescore years and ten of mere sensual existence. Go out among the homes of the poor, lift up the disconsolate, administer comfort to the forlorn; in some way, as it may come across your path, or lie in the sphere of your duty, ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin
... clearness of her judgment are notable; but her secluded life of ill-health rendered her often sentimental, high-strung, and even hysterical. She has in her the impulses and material of great poetry, but circumstances and her temperament combined to deny her the patient self-discipline necessary for the best results. She writes vehemently to assert the often-neglected rights of women and children or to denounce negro slavery and all oppression; and sometimes, as when in 'The Cry of the Children' she revealed the hideousness of child-labor in the factories, she is genuine ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... not, like Mrs. ——, phlegmatic and impenetrable, but received from nature feelings of the very finest edge. Such feelings, when they are locked up, sometimes damage the mind and temper. They don't with you. It must be partly principle, partly self-discipline, which keeps you ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... that we are a nation equal to the task of self-discipline and self-control,—a new thing on this planet. Hitherto, on the stage of history, kings and princes have been the star-actors: in them all the interest of the scene has centred: they and a few grand favorites were everything, and all the rest ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... excavated before their freshness fades. Aton-worship and Mohammedanism have an almost equal fascination for this Irishman, and the romance is permeated with their mysticism. The prophecies of a Mohammedan saint who has attained the light by a life of abstinence and self-discipline, influence the current of the romance no less than the visions of the Pharaoh Messiah, whose pure religion threatened his country with disasters like ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... Dionysius the Areopagite down to the great Fenelon, the illuminated Guyon, and M. Bertot.'[530] Tauler made a great impression on his mind, but Jacob Behmen most of all. Of these writers in general he speaks in grateful terms, as true spiritual teachers, purified by trials and self-discipline, and deeply learned in the mysteries of God, 'truly sons of thunder and sons of consolation, who awaken the heart, and leave it not till the kingdom of heaven is raised ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... speak well is, like forming character, a matter of self-discipline and self-culture. A good voice is a good habit; distinct articulation is a good habit; graceful and effective gestures are a good habit. Like all good habits, these are formed by a constant exercise of the will. The teacher's part is to get the ...
— The Speaker, No. 5: Volume II, Issue 1 - December, 1906. • Various
... still in the thick of them. A sense of proportion was as yet impossible, and a consecutive review the most difficult of intellectual feats. Langholm was too excited, and the situation too identical with suspense, for a clear sight of all its bearings and potentialities; and then there was the stern self-discipline, the determined bridling of the imagination, in which he had not yet relaxed. Once in the night, however, in the hopeless hours between darkness and broad day, he had seen clearly for a while, ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... Humankind was at least gaining fresh experience in The Castell of Perseverance; he was even besieged in a fortress and had the narrowest escape in the world from being carried off to Hell. Everyman's startling doom, his eager quest for a companion on his journey, and his zealous self-discipline keep us to the end in a state of concern for his ultimate fate. But what interest have we in Contemplation, Freewill and the rest, apart from what they say? No suggestion is thrown out at the beginning that two of the ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... this then, is the real object of all the rites, ceremonies, fasts, "prayers," meditations, initiations and procedures of self-discipline enjoined by various esoteric Eastern sects, from that course of pure and elevated aspiration which leads to the higher phases of Adeptism Real, down to the fearful and disgusting ordeals which the adherent of the "Left-hand-Road" has to pass through, all ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... of chuckles that seem to bubble off a Bell-brew of disillusionment, and you get the impression that he is laughing at himself—cynically laying bare the vanity and fallibility of his own mental processes—and forecasting self-discipline. ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy
... had chosen for a wife; and Irene Delancy would have gone to prison and to death for the sake of the man to whom she had yielded up the rich treasures of her young heart. In both cases the great drawback to happiness was the absence of self-discipline, self-denial and self-conquest. They could overcome difficulties, brave danger, set the world at defiance, if need be, for each other, and not a coward nerve give way; but when pride and passion came between them, each was a child in weakness and blind self-will. Unfortunately, persistence of ...
— After the Storm • T. S. Arthur
... in his conduct gave some handle for scandal, among the just persons who needed no repentance. It was well known that in his most solemn devotions, on those long nights of unceasing prayer and self-discipline, which won him a reputation for superhuman sanctity, there mingled always with his prayers the names of two women. And, when some worthy elder, taking courage from his years, dared to hint kindly to him that such conduct caused some scandal to the weaker brethren, 'It is true,' ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... This piece of self-discipline was crowned by joyous notices of being 'sent up for good' and 'for play' in the next half; when also occurs a letter showing a spirit of submission to ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... course, only accessible to those who are more delicately attuned to its finer vibrations. Nothing that is worth having can be had without effort, and it is only after much self-discipline that it becomes possible for the student to raise his consciousness to this higher realm and understand life from the standpoint of ...
— Within You is the Power • Henry Thomas Hamblin
... eight parts of this path are called angas. They are: 1. Right Belief (as to the law of Causation, or Karma); 2. Right Thought; 3. Right Speech; 4. Right Action; 5. Right Means of Livelihood; 6. Right Exertion; 7. Right Remembrance and Self-discipline; 8. Right Concentration of Thought. The man who keeps these angas in mind and follows them will be free from sorrow and ultimately ...
— The Buddhist Catechism • Henry S. Olcott
... maturity. The young person who refuses to play the game of marriage, just as soon as it appears that complete fulfillment of youthful wishes is not to be had, cannot grow up and never comes to see that the greater satisfactions must come out of self-discipline, emotional restraint, and a love of response that does not ask what is beyond human achievement. Not through a bringing to life of his rosy dreams of contentment, but in a fellowship that deepens through the maturing of emotional life, must one find the values ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various |
