“He who conquers others is strong;
He who conquers himself is mighty.”

— Lao Tzu 老子 1 via Lin Yutang
(Lǎozǐ)

“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.”

— Buddha गौतम बुद्ध 563 – 483 BCE
(Siddhartha Shakyamuni Gautama)
Awakened Truth

“Your own worst enemy cannot harm you as much as your thoughts if left unguarded; but, if guarded, nothing or no one could help you as much—not even your mother or father.”

— Buddha गौतम बुद्ध 563 – 483 BCE via Jack Kornfiled, Shan Dao
(Siddhartha Shakyamuni Gautama)
Awakened Truth
from Dhammapada धम्मपद

“He who requires much from himself and little from others, will keep himself from becoming the object of resentment.”

— Confucius 孔丘 551 – 479 BCE via James Legge
(Kongzi, Kǒng Zǐ)
History's most influential "failure"
from Analects

“Sagehood has nothing to do with governing others but is a matter of ordering oneself... esteem self-government and disdain governing others.”

— Wenzi 文子 1 via Thomas Cleary
(Wénzǐ)
"Authentic Presence of Pervading Mystery.”
from The Wenzi, Wénzǐ 文子

“If men live decently, it is because discipline saves their very lives for them.”

— Sophocles Σοφοκλῆς 497 – 405 BCE via Elizabeth Wyckoff
“The Wise and Honored One”
from Antigone (441 BCE)

“Do not consider painful what is good for you.”

— Euripides 480 – 406 BCE
Ancient humanitarian influence continuing today
from Medea (431 BCE)

“It was the principle of this Court that deterrent laws, however strict, are useless without positive moral discipline; that the happiness of citizens depends, not on having the walls of their porticoes covered with laws, but on having justice in their hearts.”

— Isocrates Ἰσοκράτης 436 – 338 BCE

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.”

— Aristotle Ἀριστοτέλης 382 – 322 BCE

“What it lies in our power to do, it lies in our power not to do.”

— Aristotle Ἀριστοτέλης 382 – 322 BCE via A. K. Thomson
from Nicomachean Ethics

“Wise leaders never indulge in wild pleasures without restraint. Pursuing passions without limit is like delighting in wine without moderation and leads to similar results.”

— Mencius 孟子 372 – 289 BCE via James Legge, Shan Dao
(Mengzi)
from Book of Mencius 孟子

“A young branch takes on all the bends that one gives it.”

— Anonymous 1
Freedom from the narrow boxes defined by personal history
from Chinese proverb

“If you chase two rabbits, you will lose them both.”

— Anonymous 1
Freedom from the narrow boxes defined by personal history
from Russian Proverb

“Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old he will not depart from it.”

— Rabbinic Sages 20 – 200 CE
from Hebrew Bible, The Tanakh

“Man is the only one that knows nothing, that can learn nothing without being taught, He can neither speak nor walk nor eat, and in short he can do nothing at the prompting of nature only, but weep.”

— Pliny 23 – 79 CE
(Pliny Gaius Plinius Secundus, Pliny the Elder)
Founding father of the encyclopedia

from Natural History

“Desire and aversion, though powerful, are but habits. And we can train ourselves to have better habits.”

— Epictetus Ἐπίκτητος 55 – 135 CE via Sharon Lebell
from Discourses of Epictetus, Ἐπικτήτου διατριβαί

“The life of wisdom—like anything else—demands its price... You can't be flying off in countless directions however appealing they are, and at the same time live an integrated, fruitful life... You can either put your skills toward internal work or lose yourself to externals, which is to say, be a person of wisdom or follow the common ways of the mediocre.”

— Epictetus Ἐπίκτητος 55 – 135 CE via Sharon Labell

“The warrior who has no restraint,
Though hearty and brave, will die by the sword.”

— Gesar of Ling གེ་སར་རྒྱལ་པོ། 1 via Robin Kornman
from Gesar of Ling Epic

“1. Be dutiful to your parents.
2. Be respectful to your elders.
3. Live in harmony with your neighbors.
4. Instruct your children and grandchildren.
5. Be content with your calling.
6. Do no evil.”

— Ming Taizu 明太祖 1328 – 1398 CE
(The Hongwu Emperor, Zhu Yuanzhan)
One of the most influential emperors in all of Chinese history

“A prince should have no other aim or thought, nor select anything else to study than the art of war, its rules and discipline.”

— Machiavelli 1469 – 1527 CE via W.K. Marriott, Shan Dao
(Niccolò Machiavelli)
from The Prince

“It is no hard matter to get children; but after they are born, then begins the trouble, solicitude, and care rightly to train, principle, and bring them up.”

— Montaigne 1533 – 1592 CE
Grandfather of the Enlightenment
from Essays, French Essais

“A wise reserve seasons the aims and matures the means.”

— Balthasar Gracian 1601 – 1658 CE via Joseph Jacobs
from Art of Worldly Wisdom

“'Tis education forms the common mind,
Just as the twig is bent the tree's inclined.”

— Alexander Pope 1688 – 1744 CE
Second most quoted English writer
from Moral Essays (1735)

“Religion is not a restraint; on the contrary it is an encouragement to crime. Every religion is based on expiations.”

— Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet 1694 – 1778 CE
from Notebooks

“It was an inflexible maxim of Roman discipline that good soldier should dread his own officers far more than the enemy.”

— Edward Gibbon 1737 – 1794 CE
from Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire

“Art is long, life is short; judgment difficult, opportunity transient.”

— Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 1749 – 1832 CE
from Wilhelm Meister's Apprenrticeship (1796)

“From the forces that all creatures bind, who overcomes himself his freedom finds.”

— Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 1749 – 1832 CE
from Die Geheimnisse (1776)

“The principles of war are the same as those of a siege. Fire must be concentrated on a single point and as soon as the breach is made, the equilibrium is broken and the rest is nothing.”

— Napoleon Bonaparte 1769 – 1821 CE

“The strong man is the one who is able to intercept at will the communication between the senses and the mind.”

— Napoleon Bonaparte 1769 – 1821 CE
from Maxims (1804-15)

“We learn to curb our will and keep our overt actions within the bounds of humanity, long before we can subdue our sentiments and imaginations”

— William Hazlitt 1778 – 1830 CE
One of the English languages best art and literature critics of all time

from The Plain Speaker (1826)

“Man who man would be,
must rule the empire of himself.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley 1792 – 1822 CE
from Political Greatness (1821)

“we are in danger of forgetting the language which all things and events speak without metaphor… No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert.”

— Henry David Thoreau 1817 – 1862 CE
Father of environmentalism and America's first yogi
from On the Duty of Civil Disobedience

70. Inscrutable

“I must get up earlier and take a morning walk; I must have done with luxuries and devote myself to my muse. So I dam up my stream, and my waters gather to a head. I am freighted with thought.”

— Henry David Thoreau 1817 – 1862 CE
Father of environmentalism and America's first yogi
from Journals, 1853

“Let the wise be warned against too great a readiness at explanation: it multiplies the sources of mistake, lengthening the sum for reckoners sure to go wrong.”

— George Eliot 1819 – 1880 CE
(Mary Anne Evans)
Pioneering literary outsider

from Middlemarch

“A man can seldom — very, very seldom — fight a winning fight against his training: the odds are too heavy.”

— Mark Twain 1835 – 1910 CE
(Samuel Langhorne Clemens)
America’s most famous author
from As Regards Patriotism (1923)

“I was born undisciplined. Never, even as a child, could I be made to obey a set rule. School was always like a prison to me, I could never bring myself to stay there, even four hours a day, when the sun was shining and the sea was so tempting, and it was such fun scrambling over cliffs and paddling in the shallows. Such, to the great despair of my parents, was the unruly but healthy life I lived until I was fourteen or fifteen. In the meantime I somehow picked up the rudiments of reading, writing and arithmetic, with a smattering of spelling. And there my schooling ended. It never worried me very much because I always had plenty of amusements on the side. I doodled in the margins of my books, I decorated our blue copy paper with ultra-fantastic drawings, and I drew the faces and profiles of my schoolmasters as outrageously as I could, distorting them out of all recognition.”

— Claude Monet 1840 – 1926 CE
"the driving force behind Impressionism"

“A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure.”

— Oscar Wilde 1854 – 1900 CE
from Picture of Dorian Gray

“It is a new road to happiness, if you have strength enough to castigate a little the various impulses that sway you in turn.”

— Santayana, George 1863 – 1952 CE
(Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás)
Powerfully influential, true-to-himself philosopher/poet
from Winds of Doctrine (1913)

“Once you have embarked on the path of liberation, it is inappropriate to behave in an ordinary way: observe your mind all the time with vigilance and lucidity.”

— Shechen Gyaltsap 1871 – 1926 CE via Matthieu Ricard
Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche's main teacher
from Chariot of Complete Liberation

“All moral discipline, all moral perfection derived from the soul of literature, from the soul of human dignity, which was the moving spirit of both humanity and politics... civilization!”

— Thomas Mann 1875 – 1955 CE
Deep, psychologically insightful author
from The Magic Mountain (1924)

“Not to want to do something is a mental content impossible to live on.”

— Thomas Mann 1875 – 1955 CE
Deep, psychologically insightful author
from Mario and the Magician (1929)

“I had been struggling for a lifetime to stretch my mind until it creaked at the breaking point in order to bring forth a great idea able to give a new meaning to life, a new meaning to death, and comfort to men.”

— Nikos Kazantzakis 1883 – 1957 CE via P. A. Bien
from Report to Greco

“The human being cannot support absolute freedom; such freedom leads him to chaos... Man is able to bear working only in a fixed, circumscribed arena.”

— Nikos Kazantzakis 1883 – 1957 CE via P. A. Bien
from Report to Greco

“Perhaps the basic skill that we should ask a teacher to impart to his pupil is the ability to discipline himself; for in this stormy age every individual, like every people, has in the long run only two choices—effective self-government, or practical subjection”

— Will Durant 1885 – 1981 CE
Philosophy apostle and popularizer of history's lessons
from Fallen Leaves

“I mourn when brilliant writers... tell us that we should yield to every impulse and desire, and 'be ourselves'! What jejune nonsense! Civilization... is at almost every moment dependent upon the repression of instincts, and intelligence itself involves discrimination between desire that may be pursued and those that should be subdued.”

— Will Durant 1885 – 1981 CE
Philosophy apostle and popularizer of history's lessons
from Fallen Leaves

“The great Mohammedan theologian, Al-Ghazzali, had similarly turned from the consideration of truths about God to the contemplation and direct apprehension of Truth-the-Fact, from the purely intellectual discipline of the philosophers to the moral and spiritual discipline of the Sufis.”

— Aldous Huxley 1894 – 1963 CE
from Perennial Philosophy

“Discipline does not mean suppression and control, nor is it adjustment to a pattern or ideology. It means a mind that sees 'what is' and learns from 'what was'.”

— Krishnamurti 1895 – 1986 CE
(Jiddu Krishnamurti)

“Either you think — or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald 1896 – 1940 CE
Prototype of "Jazz Age" exuberance
from Tender is the Night (1934)

“Dictatorships breed oppression, dictatorships breed servility, dictatorships breed cruelty; more loathsome still is the fact that they breed idiocy... mere discipline usurping the place of clear thinking ... Fighting these sad monotonies is one of the duties of a writer.”

— Jorge Luis Borges 1899 – 1986 CE
Literary Explorer of Labyrinthian Dreams, Mirrors, and Mythologies

“All thinking demands a stop-and-think.”

— Hannah Arendt 1906 – 1975 CE
Fearless researcher into the darker reaches of the human psyche

“What is implied here is nothing less than the healing of the split between the two hemispheres of our brain which have become separated, alienated and at war with each other during the past few thousand years... This verse welcomes the disappearance of all boundaries among art, science, and religion as the walls and premises of every discipline dissolve into a higher consciousness”

— Ralph Alan Dale 1920 – 2006 CE
Translator, author, visionary
from Tao Te Ching, a new translation and commentary

1. The Unnamed

“To think bad thoughts is really the easiest thing in the world. If you leave your mind to itself it will spiral you down into ever-increasing unhappiness. To think good thoughts, however, requires effort. This is one of the things that need discipline –training… So train your mind”

— James Clavell 1921 – 1994 CE
Fictionalizing and fictional historian
from Shōgun, 1975

“There is an inner core common to all religions: the universal teachings of morality and charity, of a disciplined and pure mind full of love, compassion, goodwill and tolerance.”

— Goenka ဂိုအင်ကာ 1924 – 2013 CE
(Satya Narayan)
"The Man who Taught the World to Meditate"

“the highest form of freedom carries with it the greatest measure of discipline”

— César Chavez César Estrada Chávez 1927 – 1993 CE
(César Estrada Chávez)

“Our priests and presidents, our surgeons and lawyers, our educators and newscasters worry less about the demands of their discipline than the demands of good showmanship. What is and what is not show business becomes harder and harder to see… ‘There’s No Business But Show Business.’”

— Neil Postman 1931 – 2003 CE via Shan Dao
from Amusing Ourselves to Death

“A man who is willing to undertake the discipline and the difficulty of mending his own ways is worth more to the conservation movement than a hundred who are insisting merely that the government and the industries mend their ways.”

— Wendell Berry 1934 CE –

29. Not Doing

“Thomas Merton really is someone that we can look up to.... he had the complete qualities of hearing—study, contemplating, thinking on the teachings—and of meditation. He also had the qualities of being learned, disciplined and having a good heart... for the rest of my life, the impact of meeting him will remain until my last breath.”

— Dalai Lama XIV Tenzin Gyatso 1935 CE –
from A Tribute to Thomas Merton

“As a model, this discipline of minimum needs, maximum contentment speaks directly to the type of individual conservationism this is a theme of environmentally conscious culture.”

— Dzigar Kongtrül Rinpoche ཛི་གར་ཀོང་སྤྲུལ། 1964 CE –
from Minimum Needs and Maximum Contentment

“Immersed in consumerism, how can we break away from this culture of addiction? We will need inner discipline and we'll need to choose a lifestyle of minimum needs and maximum contentment.”

— Dzigar Kongtrül Rinpoche ཛི་གར་ཀོང་སྤྲུལ། 1964 CE – via Shan Dao
from Minimum Needs and Maximum Contentment

“Short or long term, the clearer we can see what we are setting out to achieve, the more likely we are to achieve it.”

— Simon Sinek 1973 CE –
from Leaders Eat Last

“Glimpses of pristine awareness can be treransfomative, but it takes work to stabilize the view. This why we say, Short moments, many times. Many, many times.”

— Mingyur Rinpoche 1975 CE –
Modern-day Mahasiddha

from In Love with the World

“We inherently have free will yet this only arises from an examined mind... Until we learn how to examine our minds and direct our behavior, our karmic tendencies will compel habits to reseed themselves.”

— Mingyur Rinpoche 1975 CE –
Modern-day Mahasiddha

from In Love with the World

“We can train ourselves to shake the habits of deception and manipulation that creep into our human relationshlps, but this will take a conscious and concerted effort.”

— Karmapa XVII ཨོ་རྒྱན་འཕྲིན་ལས་རྡོ་རྗ 1985 CE –
(Orgyen Thrinlay Dorje)
from Interconnected (2017)