Quotes about Control

Let's love ourselves so much that we won't permit our enemies to control our happiness, our health, and our looks

Even if we can't love our enemies, let's at least love ourselves. Let's love ourselves so much that we won't permit our enemies to control our happiness, our health and our looks. As Shakespeare put it: Heat not a furnace for your foe so hot That it do singe yourself.

He never raised his voice, even in the midst of volatile situations.

Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not. "Thus the sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there...

Much of our problem is not, as is often said, that we have failed to get what is in our head down in our heart. Much of what hinders us is that we have had a lot of mistaken theology in our head and it has gotten down into our heart. And it is controlling our inner dynamics so that the head and heart cannot, even with the aid of the Word and the Spirit, pull one another straight.

Anything done in anger can be done better without it!

And God has set up prayer in such a way that, if you want to explain it away, you can. That's the human mind. God set it up like that for a reason, which is this: God ordained that people should be governed in the end by what they want.

We cannot behave on the spot as he did and taught if in the rest of our time we live as everybody else does. The on the spot episodes are not the place where we can, even by the grace of God, redirect unchristlike but ingrained tendencies of action toward sudden Christlikeness. Our efforts to take control at that moment will fail so uniformly and ingloriously that the whole project of following Christ will appear ridiculous to the watching world.

Our "kingdom" is simply the range of our effective will. Whatever we genuinely have the say over is in our kingdom.

In our spiritual disintegration we may not be able to rule the earth, but we now have the power several times over to ruin it utterly.

Recall, now, that the kingdom of God is the range of his effective will: that is, it is the domain where what he prefers is actually what happens.

Practice in not speaking can at least give us enough control over what we say that our tongues do not "go off" automatically. This discipline provides us with a certain inner distance that gives us time to consider our words fully and the presence of mind to control what we say and when we say it.