Very often in everyday life one sees that by losing one's temper with someone who has already lost his, one does not gain anything but only sets out upon the path of stupidity. He who has enough self-control to stand firm at the moment when the other person is in a temper, wins in the end. It is not he who has spoken a hundred words aloud who has won; it is he who has perhaps spoken only one word.
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.
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.
In the modern world, self-control buys a good life indeed. Having self-control to spare is rare enough nowadays that the marketplace lavishes huge rewards on society's scary new self-control elite, those lords of discipline who not only withstood all that boring stuff in graduate school, but keep themselves thin by carefully regulating what they eat after flogging themselves off to the gym at the crack of dawn. It's as if they got the news ahead of the rest of us-no doubt by waking up earlier-that self-control may well be the most important trait of the twenty-first century.
When we exercise self-control on a given occasion, we win for ourselves a little credibility we can rely on the next time around. Pretty soon we develop a reputation to ourselves that we want badly to uphold. With each test that we meet, our resolve gains momentum, fueled by the fear that we may succumb and establish a damaging precedent for our own weakness.
I’m not the kind of man to bottle up my feelings, Kells. I don’t sit up in my room pining away, writing love poems. I’m not a dreamer. I’m a fighter. I’m a man of action, and it will take all of my self-control not to fight for this. When something needs to be done, I do it. When I feel something, I act on it. I don’t see any reason why Ren deserves to get the girl of his dreams and I don’t. It doesn’t seem fair that this happens to me twice.
‎True love isn't expressed in passionately whispered words an intimate kiss or a embrace; before two people are married, love is expressed in self-control, patience, even words left unsaid.
Attention to our duties provides far greater rewards than beauty and wit. Self-control is what differentiates us from the beasts. Without it, we are merely animals.