Alice Duer Miller Quotes

Fasting is, first and foremost, an exercise for identifying and managing adversity in all its forms. With faith, in full conscience, fasting calls women and men to an extra degree of self-awareness.

I gave it my body and mind, but I have kept my soul.

Discipline is something we despise for the moment.... We all look for a place to run, an excuse with which to stall. No one enjoys it. Yet those of us who have endured it know that the fruit it produces and the pain from which it ultimately spares us makes it worth the agony.

Some people are capable of making great sacrifices, but few are capable of concealing how much the effort has cost them; and it is this concealment that constitutes their value.

Here’s one of my favorite statements: We are never going to enjoy stability, we are never going to enjoy spiritual maturity until we learn how to do what’s right when it feels wrong, and every time you do what’s right by a decision of your will using discipline and self control to go beyond how you feel, the more painful it is in your flesh, the more you’re growing spiritually at that particular moment.

Humility and self-restraint is the True Objective of Kenpo

The Martyr finds her way to self-knowledge through pain, suffering, and surrender.

There is a contemptibly quiet path for all those who are afraid of the blows and clamor of opposing forces. There is no honorable fighting for a man who is not ready to forget that he has a head to be battered and a name to be bespattered. Truth wants no champion who is not as ready to be struck as to strike for her.

Do not cry for me, Azrael. Do not waste your tears. You made your decision. And this is mine. Sacrifice seems to be my destiny. A funny thing for a selfish man, isn't it? They always called me weak back then.

Thoroughly convinced of the impossibility of his own suit, a high resolve constrained him not to injure that of another. This is a lover's most stoical virtue, as the lack of it is a lover's most venial sin.

Any asshole can chase a skirt, art takes discipline.

I have disciplined myself when I'm working. When I discovered art, I realized that one could keep that search going within creation. But I also realize that in order to create the art, you have to stay, you can't go too far.

Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it, summon it, from even the most tragic of circumstances.

Today I will surrender to discipline. I realize that sometimes it takes time to see the fruits of my labors, yet I still need to practice discipline. Help me to remember, God, that I'm moving forward, and that I'm learning the very important art of discipline.

Your life is a work of art, and in the end, the underlying theme of great art is bravery and hope and love.

I can bear pain myself, he said softly, but I couldna bear yours. That would take more strength than I have.

When you get in taekwondo, it teaches you the life skills of respect, self control, discipline-that's why I love it. I really attribute those skills to really getting over my dad's death. If I didn't have that, I would have lost it.

This is the substance of the Way of the Samurai: if by setting one's heart right every morning and evening, one is able to live as though his body were already dead, he gains freedom in the Way. his whole life will be without blame, and he will succeed in his calling.

Discipline brings us effort, sacrifice and suffering. Later it brings us something of an inestimable value: something of which those who live only for pleasure, profit or amusement will always be deprived. This peculiar indefinable joy which one must have felt oneself to understand is the sign with which life marks its moment of triumph.

Bravery comes along as a gradual accumulation of discipline.

any fool can be happy. It takes a man with real heart to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep.

Virtue is despotic; life, reputation, every earthly good, must be surrendered at her voice. The law may seem hard, but it is the guardian of what it commands; and is the only sure defence of happiness.

A work of art is not a matter of thinking beautiful thoughts or experiencing tender emotions , but of intelligence, skill, taste, proportion, knowledge, discipline and industry; especially discipline.

It is more difficult, and it calls for higher energies of soul, to live a martyr than to die one.

The first level of practice is illuminated by the qualities of courage and renunciation.