Alain Lacroix
The idea of discipline tends to create a dividing line between people—between those who advocate for control and those attached to the idea of unfettered freedom. As with most dividing lines though, the middle between the extremes often holds the best course. Too much freedom too easily sinks into chaos and anarchy; too much discipline and control into repression and constricting, status quo conformity. Most of the quotes here define and recommend a healthy balance, a middle way full of insight and wisdom.
“To enjoy good health, to bring true happiness to one's family, to bring peace to all, one must first discipline and control one's own mind. If a man can control his mind he can find the way to Enlightenment, and all wisdom and virtue will naturally come to him.”
“Your own worst enemy cannot harm you as much as your thoughts if left unguarded; but, if guarded, nothing or no one could help you as much—not even your mother or father.”
“He who requires much from himself and little from others, will keep himself from becoming the object of resentment.”
“Sagehood has nothing to do with governing others but is a matter of ordering oneself... esteem self-government and disdain governing others.”
“If men live decently, it is because discipline saves their very lives for them.”
“It was the principle of this Court that deterrent laws, however strict, are useless without positive moral discipline; that the happiness of citizens depends, not on having the walls of their porticoes covered with laws, but on having justice in their hearts.”
“Wise leaders never indulge in wild pleasures without restraint. Pursuing passions without limit is like delighting in wine without moderation and leads to similar results.”
“Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old he will not depart from it.”
“Man is the only one that knows nothing, that can learn nothing without being taught, He can neither speak nor walk nor eat, and in short he can do nothing at the prompting of nature only, but weep.”
“The life of wisdom—like anything else—demands its price... You can't be flying off in countless directions however appealing they are, and at the same time live an integrated, fruitful life... You can either put your skills toward internal work or lose yourself to externals, which is to say, be a person of wisdom or follow the common ways of the mediocre.”
“Desire and aversion, though powerful, are but habits. And we can train ourselves to have better habits.”
“The warrior who has no restraint,
Though hearty and brave, will die by the sword.”
“1. Be dutiful to your parents.
2. Be respectful to your elders.
3. Live in harmony with your neighbors.
4. Instruct your children and grandchildren.
5. Be content with your calling.
6. Do no evil.”
“A prince should have no other aim or thought, nor select anything else to study than the art of war, its rules and discipline.”
“It is no hard matter to get children; but after they are born, then begins the trouble, solicitude, and care rightly to train, principle, and bring them up.”
“'Tis education forms the common mind,
Just as the twig is bent the tree's inclined.”
“Religion is not a restraint; on the contrary it is an encouragement to crime. Every religion is based on expiations.”
“It was an inflexible maxim of Roman discipline that good soldier should dread his own officers far more than the enemy.”
“From the forces that all creatures bind, who overcomes himself his freedom finds.”
“The principles of war are the same as those of a siege. Fire must be concentrated on a single point and as soon as the breach is made, the equilibrium is broken and the rest is nothing.”
“The strong man is the one who is able to intercept at will the communication between the senses and the mind.”
“We learn to curb our will and keep our overt actions within the bounds of humanity, long before we can subdue our sentiments and imaginations”
“I must get up earlier and take a morning walk; I must have done with luxuries and devote myself to my muse. So I dam up my stream, and my waters gather to a head. I am freighted with thought.”
“we are in danger of forgetting the language which all things and events speak without metaphor… No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert.”
“Let the wise be warned against too great a readiness at explanation: it multiplies the sources of mistake, lengthening the sum for reckoners sure to go wrong.”
“A man can seldom — very, very seldom — fight a winning fight against his training: the odds are too heavy.”
“I was born undisciplined. Never, even as a child, could I be made to obey a set rule. School was always like a prison to me, I could never bring myself to stay there, even four hours a day, when the sun was shining and the sea was so tempting, and it was such fun scrambling over cliffs and paddling in the shallows. Such, to the great despair of my parents, was the unruly but healthy life I lived until I was fourteen or fifteen. In the meantime I somehow picked up the rudiments of reading, writing and arithmetic, with a smattering of spelling. And there my schooling ended. It never worried me very much because I always had plenty of amusements on the side. I doodled in the margins of my books, I decorated our blue copy paper with ultra-fantastic drawings, and I drew the faces and profiles of my schoolmasters as outrageously as I could, distorting them out of all recognition.”
“A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure.”
“It is a new road to happiness, if you have strength enough to castigate a little the various impulses that sway you in turn.”
“Once you have embarked on the path of liberation, it is inappropriate to behave in an ordinary way: observe your mind all the time with vigilance and lucidity.”
“All moral discipline, all moral perfection derived from the soul of literature, from the soul of human dignity, which was the moving spirit of both humanity and politics... civilization!”
“I had been struggling for a lifetime to stretch my mind until it creaked at the breaking point in order to bring forth a great idea able to give a new meaning to life, a new meaning to death, and comfort to men.”
“The human being cannot support absolute freedom; such freedom leads him to chaos... Man is able to bear working only in a fixed, circumscribed arena.”
“Perhaps the basic skill that we should ask a teacher to impart to his pupil is the ability to discipline himself; for in this stormy age every individual, like every people, has in the long run only two choices—effective self-government, or practical subjection”
“I mourn when brilliant writers... tell us that we should yield to every impulse and desire, and 'be ourselves'! What jejune nonsense! Civilization... is at almost every moment dependent upon the repression of instincts, and intelligence itself involves discrimination between desire that may be pursued and those that should be subdued.”
“The great Mohammedan theologian, Al-Ghazzali, had similarly turned from the consideration of truths about God to the contemplation and direct apprehension of Truth-the-Fact, from the purely intellectual discipline of the philosophers to the moral and spiritual discipline of the Sufis.”
“Discipline does not mean suppression and control, nor is it adjustment to a pattern or ideology. It means a mind that sees 'what is' and learns from 'what was'.”
“Either you think — or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.”
“Dictatorships breed oppression, dictatorships breed servility, dictatorships breed cruelty; more loathsome still is the fact that they breed idiocy... mere discipline usurping the place of clear thinking ... Fighting these sad monotonies is one of the duties of a writer.”
“Zen is not some kind of excitement, but concentration on our usual everyday routine.”
“What is implied here is nothing less than the healing of the split between the two hemispheres of our brain which have become separated, alienated and at war with each other during the past few thousand years... This verse welcomes the disappearance of all boundaries among art, science, and religion as the walls and premises of every discipline dissolve into a higher consciousness”
“To think bad thoughts is really the easiest thing in the world. If you leave your mind to itself it will spiral you down into ever-increasing unhappiness. To think good thoughts, however, requires effort. This is one of the things that need discipline –training… So train your mind”
“There is an inner core common to all religions: the universal teachings of morality and charity, of a disciplined and pure mind full of love, compassion, goodwill and tolerance.”
“Our priests and presidents, our surgeons and lawyers, our educators and newscasters worry less about the demands of their discipline than the demands of good showmanship. What is and what is not show business becomes harder and harder to see… ‘There’s No Business But Show Business.’”
“A man who is willing to undertake the discipline and the difficulty of mending his own ways is worth more to the conservation movement than a hundred who are insisting merely that the government and the industries mend their ways.”
“Thomas Merton really is someone that we can look up to.... he had the complete qualities of hearing—study, contemplating, thinking on the teachings—and of meditation. He also had the qualities of being learned, disciplined and having a good heart... for the rest of my life, the impact of meeting him will remain until my last breath.”
“Immersed in consumerism, how can we break away from this culture of addiction? We will need inner discipline and we'll need to choose a lifestyle of minimum needs and maximum contentment.”
“As a model, this discipline of minimum needs, maximum contentment speaks directly to the type of individual conservationism this is a theme of environmentally conscious culture.”
“Short or long term, the clearer we can see what we are setting out to achieve, the more likely we are to achieve it.”
“Glimpses of pristine awareness can be treransfomative, but it takes work to stabilize the view. This why we say, Short moments, many times. Many, many times.”
“We inherently have free will yet this only arises from an examined mind... Until we learn how to examine our minds and direct our behavior, our karmic tendencies will compel habits to reseed themselves.”
“We can train ourselves to shake the habits of deception and manipulation that creep into our human relationshlps, but this will take a conscious and concerted effort.”
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