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- What mattered was not what happens to you, but how you handle it. Self-command is required to overcome the dangerous misinformation of our emotions, and because for the most part the self is the only thing that we can command. We have no control, ultimately, over what people do or think. What we can influence is our understanding of these circumstances and how we respond to them.
- Daniel Akst, We Have Met the Enemy: Self-Control in an Age of Excess, 2011
- Maybe it would be better to acknowledge, like the Greeks, that a lot of behavior we call addiction is really a love of pleasure that carries the force of habit. We become addicted mostly because of the central issue in all self-control problems, which is the disproportionate value we place on short-term rewards.
- Daniel Akst, We Have Met the Enemy: Self-Control in an Age of Excess, 2011
- Our choices add up; each one influences others, and cumulatively a series of delightful short-term choices can leave us much worse off in the long run.
- Daniel Akst, We Have Met the Enemy: Self-Control in an Age of Excess, 2011
- At least one study of blocked writers has found that they were more productive and more creative when they were essentially forced to write instead of scribbling only when the mood struck them.
- Daniel Akst, We Have Met the Enemy: Self-Control in an Age of Excess, 2011
- In the modern world, self-control buys a good life indeed. Having self-control to spare is rare enough nowadays that the marketplace lavishes huge rewards on society's scary new self-control elite, those lords of discipline who not only withstood all that boring stuff in graduate school, but keep themselves thin by carefully regulating what they eat after flogging themselves off to the gym at the crack of dawn. It's as if they got the news ahead of the rest of us-no doubt by waking up earlier-that self-control may well be the most important trait of the twenty-first century.
- Daniel Akst, We Have Met the Enemy: Self-Control in an Age of Excess, 2011
- Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites.
- Edmund Burke (1729 - 1797), We Have Met the Enemy: Self-Control in an Age of Excess, 2011
- Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without.
- Edmund Burke (1729 - 1797), We Have Met the Enemy: Self-Control in an Age of Excess, 2011
- Be systematically heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than its difficulty, so that, when the hour of need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved or untrained to stand the test.
- Daniel Akst, We Have Met the Enemy: Self-Control in an Age of Excess, 2011
- The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.
- William James (1842 - 1910), The Principles of Psychology
- When we exercise self-control on a given occasion, we win for ourselves a little credibility we can rely on the next time around. Pretty soon we develop a reputation to ourselves that we want badly to uphold. With each test that we meet, our resolve gains momentum, fueled by the fear that we may succumb and establish a damaging precedent for our own weakness.
- Daniel Akst, We Have Met the Enemy: Self-Control in an Age of Excess, 2011
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