Theodore Dalrymple Quotes

A man is rational in proportion as his intelligence informs and controls his desires.

The life of children, as much as that of intemperate men, is wholly governed by their desires.

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

When man learns to understand and control his own behavior as well as he is learning to understand and control the behavior of crop plants and domestic animals, he may be justified in believing that he has become civilized.

He that discovers himself, till he hath made himself master of his desires, lays himself open to his own ruin, and makes himself prisoner to his own tongue.

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

For the first time, the object of what I want is more important than fulfilling my desires.

While expressing your desires, you would need to exercise control in order to prevent them from doing harm to you or to others.

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

If you have a great many desires, you will gradually eliminate them one by one, until you allow certain desires to dominate and the others to die away.

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

I'm really not good with impulse control.

Self-restraint may be alien to the human temperament, but humanity without restraint will dig its own grave.

Observing desire without acting on it enlarges our freedom to choose how we live.

The Fremen were supreme in that quality the ancients called "spannungsbogen" -- which is the self-imposed delay between desire for a thing and the act of reaching out to grasp that thing.

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.

In meditation we can watch the itch instead of scratching it.

I despise people who can't control themselves.

Learn to distinguish what you can and can't control. Within our control are our own opinions, aspirations, desires and the things that repel us. They are directly subject to our influence.

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

the way to wean any one from a desire is not by condemnation of it.

I will have a care of being a slave to myself, for it is a perpetual, a shameful, and the heaviest of all servitudes; and this may be done by moderate desires.

The intelligent desire self-control; children want candy.

We are like a rider on top of a gigantic elephant. We can steer the elephant, and if he's not busy, he'll go where we want, but if he has other desires, he'll often go where he wants. How can one control the elephant? In part, this comes with maturity. In part, this comes with the development of your frontal cortex, so the frontal areas of the brain are especially involved in self-control, in suppressing your initial instinct to act. This is why teenagers are so impulsive. So it's terrible to allow the death penalty for teenagers, because they really don't have working brains yet.

The appetites will rule if the mind is vacant.