Richard L. Evans Quotes

If you can't control what you think, you will not be able to control what you do.

You can learn not to want what you want, to recognize desires but not be controlled by them.

You have two choices: to control your mind or to let your mind control you.

You either control your mind or it controls you.

The ability to subordinate an impulse to a value is the essence of the proactive person.

Self-control is solely a matter of thought-control!

If you first gain power to check your words, you will then begin to have power to check your judgment, and at length actually gain power to check your thoughts and reflections.

My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them.

Character is the impulse reined down into steady continuance.

The art of living consists in knowing which impulses to obey and which must be made to obey.

Temperance is simply a disposition of the mind which binds the passion.

Make a decision that from now on, your thoughts do not run you, you run your thoughts. From now on, your mind is not the captain of your ship, you are the captain of the ship, and your mind works for you.

Self-control might be as passionate and as active as the surrender to passion.

I must keep my head and not give in to desire, for desire is what causes women to drown.

A man's reaction to his appetites and impulses when they are roused gives the measure of that man's character. In these reactions are revealed the man's power to govern or his forced servility to yield.

The most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of your own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs.

We are free when we are not the slave of our impulses, but rather their master. Taking inward distance, we thus become the authors of our own dramas rather than characters in them.

It is a fact that the majority of a man's griefs comes about through lack of self-control.

Not to have control over the senses is like sailing in a rudderless ship, bound to break to pieces on coming in contact with the very first rock.

Rule your mind or it will rule you.

It is hard to fight desire; but to control it is the sign of a reasonable man.

My third maxim was to try always to conquer myself rather than fortune, and to change my desires rather than the order of the world, and generally to accustom myself to believing that there is nothing entirely in our power except our thoughts, so that after we have done our best regarding things external to us, everything in which we do not succeed is for us absolutely impossible.

One who can control his thoughts has conquered himself.

There is perhaps no psychological skill more fundamental than resisting impulse.

We are the masters of our fate, the captains of our souls, because we have the power to control our thoughts.