Meditations on Self-Discipline and Failure Quotes

“You slide into bad habits over and over again. You appear to be an inveterate backslider, and you seem to subordinate self-discipline to whims, unhealthy desires, and passing distractions. Are you an adolescent? What is your excuse for this persistent failure? Is consistent decency “too much” for you, or are you just too little for it? A dog can be house trained in a matter of days. You, a (putatively) rational being, cannot train yourself to avoid stupidity and overindulgence with decades of life experience behind you? Pitiful. Get control of yourself before your time is done!”
― William Ferraiolo, Meditations on Self-Discipline and Failure: Stoic Exercise for Mental Fitness

“7 Who are you to complain about anything? Do you claim to have been mistreated? Do you claim to have suffered needlessly? Who has not suffered? Whose suffering was more or less “necessary” than the rest? How many have suffered far more than you? Most have, have they not? To weep and bemoan your fate is ingratitude, self-absorption, and weakness. You abase yourself with every gripe and alleged grievance. Your obligation is to improve yourself as best as you are able in the time you are allotted—and never forget that you know not how long it is. This is not accomplished by whining and hurling accusations. Get on with it! No one can possibly have abused, wronged, or victimized you a fraction as often as you have done these things to yourself. You waste your time and energy on nonsense.”
― William Ferraiolo, Meditations on Self-Discipline and Failure: Stoic Exercise for Mental Fitness

“The length of your life is not nearly as important as the quality of the person living it.”
― William Ferraiolo, Meditations on Self-Discipline and Failure: Stoic Exercise for Mental Fitness

“Your detractors provide valuable lessons. Ask yourself if their criticisms are correct. If so, then improve yourself, and be grateful for their guidance. If, on the other hand, their criticisms are misguided, then recognize that their error is nothing to you. Let them persist in their misperceptions if they must. Should they change their minds and come to respect you, recognize that this is equally insignificant. Perhaps the praise will prove as well or ill-placed as the criticism. Perhaps both assessments will prove inapt and inaccurate. What of it? The wind blows, the people form beliefs, the river flows, and, in the end, the world swallows it all.”
― William Ferraiolo, Meditations on Self-Discipline and Failure: Stoic Exercise for Mental Fitness

“People have lived through far more difficult and challenging times than those confronting you—and the best among them remained persons of virtue and courage. What excuse do you manufacture for faltering where they did not? If you are a lesser being, then your failure is as it should be. Certainly, a deficient soul cannot complain of trying times. If you are not a lesser being, then set about becoming what you are capable of being, and do not poison the world with whining about circumstance. There is no need of another simpering weakling on the surface of the planet.”
― William Ferraiolo, Meditations on Self-Discipline and Failure: Stoic Exercise for Mental Fitness

“The world is, indeed, fraught with peril. The real danger, the one with which you are to be most acutely concerned, is the danger of becoming a coward and a weakling. The world can (and will) kill you, break your body, and deprive you of material possessions, but only you can deprive yourself of dignity and honor.”
― William Ferraiolo, Meditations on Self-Discipline and Failure: Stoic Exercise for Mental Fitness