"The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day."
— David Foster Wallace (This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life)

"Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, whether you like it or not."
— Thomas Henry Huxley

"Your kids require you most of all to love them for who they are, not to spend your whole time trying to correct them."
— Bill Ayers

"Where did we ever get the crazy idea that in order to make children do better, first we have to make them feel worse? Think of the last time you felt humiliated or treated unfairly. Did you feel like cooperating or doing better?"
— Jane Nelson

"Class is an aura of confidence that is being sure without being cocky. Class has nothing to do with money. Class never runs scared. It is self-discipline and self-knowledge. It's the sure-footedness that comes with having proved you can meet life. "
— Ann Landers

"I discovered that I am not disciplined out of virtue but as a reaction to my negligence, that I appear generous in order to conceal my meanness, that I pass myself off as prudent because I am evil-minded, that I am conciliatory in order not to succumb to my repressed rage, that I am punctual only to hide how little I care about other people's time."
— Gabriel García Márquez (Memories of My Melancholy Whores)

"Self-control is the chief element in self-respect, and self-respect is the chief element in courage."
— Thucydides

"If you dedicate your attention to discipline in your life you become smarter while you are writing than while you are hanging out with your pals or in any other line of work."
— Russell Banks

"It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters."
— Edmund Burke (Reflections On The Revolution In France)

"Selfishly, perhaps, Catti-brie had determined that the assassin was her own business. He had unnerved her, had stripped away years of training and discipline and reduced her to the quivering semblance of a frightened child. But she was a young woman now, no more a girl. She had to personally respond to that emotional humiliation, or the scars from it would haunt her to her grave, forever paralyzing her along her path to discover her true potential in life."
— R.A. Salvatore (Streams of Silver)

"He who graduates the harshest school, succeeds."
— Thucydides

"Do not bite at the bait of pleasure till you know there is no hook beneath it."
— Thomas Jefferson

"The overman...Who has organized the chaos of his passions, given style to his character, and become creative. Aware of life's terrors, he affirms life without resentment. "
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"Self-respect is the root of discipline: The sense of dignity grows
with the ability to say no to oneself.
"
— Abraham Joshua Heschel 1907-1972

"...true freedom is impossible without a mind made free by discipline."
— Mortimer J. Adler (How to Read a Book)

"When a child hits a child, we call it aggression.
When a child hits an adult, we call it hostility.
When an adult hits an adult, we call it assault.
When an adult hits a child, we call it discipline."
— Haim G. Ginott

"Misbehavior and punishment are not opposites that cancel each other - on the contrary they breed and reinforce each other."
— Haim G. Ginott

"You can't make your kids do anything. All you can do is make them wish they had. And then, they will make you wish you hadn't made them wish they had. "
— Marshall B. Rosenberg

"Be orderly and disciplined in daily life, like a good bourgeois, so that I might be wild and violent in my art."
— Gustave Flaubert

"Whether our action is wholesome or unwholesome depends on whether that action or deed arises from a disciplined or undisciplined state of mind. It is felt that a disciplined mind leads to happiness and an undisciplined mind leads to suffering, and in fact it is said that bringing about discipline within one's mind is the essence of the Buddha's teaching."
— Dalai Lama XIV (The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living)

"Training moments occur when both parents and children do their jobs. The parent's job is to make the rule. The child's job is to break the rule. The parent then corrects and disciplines. The child breaks the rule again, and the parent manages the consequences and empathy that then turn the rule into reality and internal structure for the child."
— Dr. Henry Cloud & Dr. John Townsend

"One painful duty fulfilled makes the next plainer and easier."
— Helen Keller (The Story of My Life)

"Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishment."
— Jim Rohn

"Good habits are worth being fanatical about.""
— John Irving

"Because you actually might not know what activities truly engage your attention and satisfy you, he says, it can be helpful to keep a diary of what you do all day and how you feel while doing it. Then, try to do more of what's rewarding, even if it takes an effort, and less of what isn't. Where optimal experience is concerned, he says, "'I just don't have the time' often means 'I just don't have the self-discipline.'""
— Winifred Gallagher (Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life)

"As we grow detached from things, we come (with God's help) to master our desires, and we give the mastery over to God. Discipline and divine grace heal the intellect and the will of the effects of concupiscence. We can begin to see things clearly."
— Scott Hahn (Lord, Have Mercy: The Healing Power of Confession)

"Inspiration is a byproduct of discipline... simply getting up everyday and planning, plotting, sketching, setting up or actually applying paint to a painting. "
— Beverly Claridge

"The essence of self-discipline is to do the important thing rather than the urgent thing."
— Barry Werner