Tao Te Ching
Control
Most seem to believe the illusion that control is a result of having power. True control though may arise from the opposite, the letting go of power and the desire to control, a surrendering to the historical, psychological, and cultural influences impinging on our lives. Even Napoleon expressed this idea when describing his life. The image of the “turning stone” in a Japanese garden symbolizes this insight as well as most of the people in our lineage lists. A big animal or person splashing through a stream only changes it for a brief moment while the slow, steady, and meditative rock becomes the lasting influence.
Quotes (83)
“Only those not seduced and controlled by something external will remain unmanipulated, uncorrupted by power.”
“To enjoy good health, to bring true happiness to one's family, to bring peace to all, one must first discipline and control one's own mind. If a man can control his mind he can find the way to Enlightenment, and all wisdom and virtue will naturally come to him.”
“The goal of meditation isn’t to control your thoughts, it’s to stop letting them control you.”
“[Pindar’s poetry is like] A river bursting its banks and rushing down a mountain with uncontrollable momentum, rain-saturated, churning, and chanting thunder.”
“Happiness and freedom begin with a clear understanding of one principle: Some things are within our control, and some things are not.”
“The Way is what things follow. Virtue is what they attain. ‘Dark Virtue’ means virtue is present but no one knows who controls it.”
“Don’t recall, don’t imagine, don’t think, don’t examine, don’t control, rest.”
“Those who seek the Tao begin by using wisdom to eliminate desires… Once their desires are gone, they eliminate wisdom… Thus by doing nothing, the sage can do great things… those who would rule the world should know the value of not being busy.”
“To say that a blind custom of obedience should be a surer obligation than duty taught and understood is to affirm that a blind man my tread surer with a guide than a seeing man by a light.”
“All systems either of preference or of restraint... retards, instead of accelerating, the progress of the society towards real wealth and greatness; and diminishes, instead of increasing, the real value of the annual produce its land and labor.”
“How an one hold on to a fixed formula and impose it on others?... Everyone has different abilities and skills. The lofty are sharp and broad but unconcerned with with detail, the deep and contemplative take one step at a time and reach their destination gradually.”
“I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education.”
“If justice ruled on earth it would be sufficient to have built one's house: it would require not further protection than this manifest right of possession. But because injustice is the order of the day, whoever bult the house must also be in a position to protect it”
“The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts.”
“All religion is nothing but the fantastic reflection in men’s minds of those external forces which control their daily life, a reflection in which the terrestrial forces assume the form of supernatural forces.”
“All that people seek on earth is someone to bow down to, someone to hand their conscience to, and some means of uniting all in one unanimous and harmonious ant-heap.”
“The mountains have a greand, stupid, lovable tranquility; the sea has a fascinating, treacherous intelligence... you can domesticate mountains, but the sea is ferae naturae.”
“Our present law-makers, as a body, are ignorant, corrupt and unprincipled; the majority of them are, directly or indirectly, under the control of the very monopolies against whose acts we have been seeking relief.”
“People are never so likely to be wrong as when they are organized. And they never have so little freedom. Perhaps that is why the people at large keep their freedom. People can be manipulated only when they are organized.”
“Occam was insistent upon this separation of theology and practical truth—a separation which manifestly released scientific inquiry from dogmatic control.”
“No one ever reads a book. He reads himself through books, either to discover or to control himself.”
“At heart Plato was a reformer, not the philosophical contemplative men called him. A life of contemplation was far from what he wanted for his pupils... to change injustice into justice, to put self-control in the place of outside control”
“Consciousness is forever interfering… It would be a simple enough thing to do, if only simplicity were not the most difficult of all things.”
“Puritanism consists in a desire to impose the natural asceticism of age upon the young, and this position is largely founded on the untenable theories of an absolute ethic and an only true theology.”
“No passion is stronger in the breast of a man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high.”
“Since inequality grows in an expanding economy... internal barbarization by the majority is part of the price that the minority pays for its control”
“Women had domesticated the sheep, the dog, the ass, and the pig; now she domesticated man. Man is woman's last domestic animal, only partially and reluctantly civilized... if pugnacity was not checked, it would lead to brawls at every corner... If sex were not controlled, it would make not only every park, but every street, unsafe for any woman... if acquisitiveness were not checked, it would lead to retail theft, wholesale robbery, political corruption, and to such concentration of wealth as would invite revolution.”
“These multiplying inventions are the new organs with which we control our environment... menial labor that degraded both master and man is lifted from human shoulders... man will be freed for the tasks of the mind.”
“An intelligent, energetic, educated woman cannot be kept in four walls — even satin-lined, diamond-studded walls — without discovering sooner or later that they are still a prison cell.”
“A society, most of whose members spend a great part of their time, not on the spot, not here and now… but somewhere else, in the irrelevant other worlds of sport and soap opera… will find it hard to resist the encroachments of those who would manipulate and control it.”
“You prefer to use Pavlov for brainwashing, Pavlov for selling cigarettes and vodka and patriotism. Pavlov for the benefit of dictators, generals and tycoons… but Pavlov could be used for good purposes, for friendliness and trust and compassion.”
“A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.”
“Control in any form breeds distortion, conflict and an unhealthy mind.”
“Films, football, beer, and above all, gambling filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult…. All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary”
“'Who controls the past' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'”
“Poor Icarus fell into the water—but Daedalus, who flew the middle way, succeeded in getting to the other shore… When you follow the path of your desire and enthusiasm and emotion; keep your mind in control and don’t let it pull you compulsively into disaster”
“From whatever aspect we consider the command, we can now see that, in the compact and perfected form it has acquired... it is the most dangerous single element in the social life of mankind. We must have the courage to stand against it and break its tyranny.”
“a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.”
“Societies are kept stable and healthy by reform, not by thought police; this means there must be free play for so-called subversive ideas.”
“The cultivation and expansion of needs is the antithesis of wisdom. It is also the antithesis of freedom and peace. Every increase in needs tends to increase one's dependence on outside forces over which one cannot have control, and therefore increases existential fear. Only by a reduction of needs can one promote a genuine reduction in those tensions which are the ultimate causes of strife and war.”
“If we throw mother nature out the window, she comes back in the door with a pitchfork.”
“symptoms... say, anxiety, migraine, depression, alcoholism, phobia, or lethargy enable the person to control others without accepting responsibility for doing so.”
“when we have Eros dominated by reason instead of Eros expressing itself with reason, we create a culture this is simply against life”
“Society persuades the individual to do what it wants by making it appear that its commands are the individual's inmost self... I am actually being controlled by other people's words and gestures masquerading as my inner or better self.”
“As human beings, we like things to be fixed. We're always trying to control the world so we can be safe. But in doing so, we make the world very small, seemingly more manageable—like a pigeonhole.”
“The American system is the most ingenious system of control in world history… There is none that disperses its controls more complexly through the voting system, the work situation, the church, the family, the school, the mass media—none more successful in mollifying opposition with reforms, isolating people from one another, creating patriotic loyalty.”
“My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them.”
“The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power. Because they control the minds of the masses.”
“Whoever controls the media, the images, controls the culture.”
“We can only control the end by making a choice at each step—obscure admixtures, blends with no proper tool by which to untangle the components—… and we cannot do it all at once; it is a sequence, an unfolding process.”
“The mass media [systematic propaganda] serves as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace… to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society.”
“The more you can increase fear of drugs, crime, welfare mothers, immigrants and aliens, the more you control all of the people.”
“I take the liberty of reading this chapter as a description of what we, ordinary people, should fear… the ruler. It’s certainly what William Blake would have told the oligarchs of the Industrial Revolution, who still control our lives.”
“We’re used, our lives shaped and controlled, by our machines, cars, planes, weaponry, bulldozers, computers. These Taoists don’t surrender their power to their creations.”
“Our world is now marred by many prison-cultures with the machinery of thought control… distracted by trivia, a perpetual round of entertainments… Big Brother does not watch us by his choice. We watch him by ours.”
“Technology is ideology without words and all the more powerful for their absence.”
“If we must obey to command, then our commanding is only obeying and not commanding at all.”
“We find ourselves constantly assailed by forces trying to manipulate and control us. Internally they manifest as vestigial emotions and instincts based on prehistoric human conditions. Externally, they often arise from political and economic interests with goals diametrically opposed to our own self interests and values.”
“I don't know how someone controlled you, they bought and sold you. I look at you all see the love there that's sleeping
While my guitar gently weeps”
“The early Mongol rulers clearly recognized that knowledge constituted their most potent weapon and controlling the flow of information served as their organizing principle.”
“We try to fix the outside so much, but our control of the outer world is limited, temporary, and often, illusory.”
“When you can't retell for yourself the stories of your life then you live in a prison… somebody else controls the story.”
“each person exists as an individual, but the self, or personal identity, is not an independent ego that is somehow in control of body and mind. Rather… a matrix of dependently related events in a state of flux.”
“Very powerful forces are adamantly opposed to creating full employment [because] if enacted would remove ‘wage pressure’ — the fear struck into the hearts of the poor, of anyone who feared becoming poor, almost everyone on Earth.”
“Understanding genetic control is understanding we’re all puppets and our best hope for even partial liberation is deciphering the logic of the puppeteer [who has] exactly zero regard for the happiness of the puppets.”
“people who long ago decided it wasn't sophisticated to be sincere, that sincerity was for fools, that sincere people were put on earth to be manipulated and exploited by people like them—for the greater good of course.”
“As long as one is in control, one is happy, and as long as someone else holds the leash, one is unhappy.”
“The Rubáiyát was an unapologetic expression of hedonism, bringing to mind sensuous embraces in jasmine-filled gardens on balmy Arabian nights, accompanied by cups of cool, intoxicating wine. It was a passionate outcry against the unofficial Victorian ideologies of moderation, primness and self-control.”
“The human brain is a machine designed by natural selection to respond in pretty reflexive fashion to the sensory input impinging on it… If you interact with those feelings via the natural, reflexive thirst for the pleasant feelings and the natural, reflexive aversion to the unpleasant feelings—you will continue to be controlled by the world around you.”
“It is not the demands of the job that cause the most stress, but the degree of control workers feel they have throughout their day… less control, more stress… Leaders have overall lower stress levels than those who work for them.”
“liberated from the tyranny of the monkey-mind… awareness itself allows us to stand at the river’s edge without getting sucked into the current. Thoughts are still there but we have stopped identifying with them. We have become the awareness, not the thoughts”
“Sadly, the influence of conditioning is so strong that we rarely remember that we can step back. And because our understanding is limited, we mistake the little part we do see for the whole truth.”
“If governments and corporations succeed in hacking the human animal, the easiest people to manipulate will be those who believe in free will.”
“In the past, censorship worked by blocking the flow of information. In the twenty-first century, censorship works by flooding people with irrelevant information. [...] In ancient times having power meant having access to data. Today having power means knowing what to ignore.”
“Every day millions of people decide to grant their smartphone a bit more control over their lives or try a new and more effective antidepressant drug. In pursuit of health, happiness and power, humans will gradually change first one of their features and then another, and another, until they will no longer be human.”
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