The thing with your heart's desire is that your heart doesn't even know what it desires until it turns up.
‎"Today's dirty hands are tomorrow's muddy water
A library is like an island in the middle of a vast sea of ignorance, particularly if the library is very tall and the surrounding area has been flooded.
Go boldly and honestly through the world. Learn to love the fact that there is nobody else quite like you.
Self-regulation will always be a challenge, but if somebody's going to be in charge, it might as well be me.
What self-control doesn't mean is mindless self-sacrifice or knee-jerk self-denial. On the contrary, it represents an affirmation of self, for it requires not the negation of instinct but its integration into a more complete form of character-one that takes account of more than just immediate pleasures and pains. The self-control I'm talking about means acting in keeping with your highest level of reflection.
Besides, what matters, when it comes to self-control, isn't so much willpower as vision-the ability to see the future, so that the long-run consequences of our short-run choices are vividly clear. In that sense, our shortcomings in this arena are really failures of imagination.
In matters of self-control as we shall see again and again, speed kills. But a little friction really can save lives.
What mattered was not what happens to you, but how you handle it. Self-command is required to overcome the dangerous misinformation of our emotions, and because for the most part the self is the only thing that we can command. We have no control, ultimately, over what people do or think. What we can influence is our understanding of these circumstances and how we respond to them.
Maybe it would be better to acknowledge, like the Greeks, that a lot of behavior we call addiction is really a love of pleasure that carries the force of habit. We become addicted mostly because of the central issue in all self-control problems, which is the disproportionate value we place on short-term rewards.