Discipline quotes
1.8K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Browse quotes that often appear alongside discipline — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"The libertarian thinks that this world is chiefly a stage for the swaggering ego; the conservative finds himself instead a pilgrim in a realm of mystery and wonder, where duty, discipline, and sacrifice are required-and where the reward is that love which passeth all understanding."
"This discipline and rough treatment are a furnace to extract the silver from the dross. This testing purifies the gold by boiling the scum away."
"Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline, you've got to go so far, so fast, in such a small space that you've just got to turn away all the peripherals."
"I think that we already have a really good system in town, but I have a vision that it could be even better. My vision is that academic excellence is the area that we should pursue more, coupled with fiscal discipline."
"Ali was a guy that had a lot of discipline. If you hung around him, you'd be able to get some of that discipline that he had. And I learned from that. He was a sweet man."
"The one thing more difficult than following a regime is keeping from imposing it on others."
"The Tathagatha... is the originator of the path unarisen before, the producer of the path unproduced before, the declarer of the path undeclared before. He is the knower of the path, the discoverer of the path, the one skilled in the path. And his disciplines now dwell following that path and become possessed of it afterwards."
"A prince must not have any other object nor any other thought… but war, its institutions, and its discipline; because that is the only art befitting one who commands."
"Reason should direct, and appetite obey."
"If Democracy should fail, it would be because we had been so lacking in self-discipline that our personal problems had taken all our substance and energies, leaving us nothing of value to contribute to the commonwealth."
"Genius at first is little more than a great capacity for receiving discipline."
"Freedom in intellectual work is found to be the basis of internal discipline."
"Through discipline, discipline is the other side of discipleship. If you want to follow Jesus, you have to have discipline."
"Jesus didn't live alone. He had Peter, John, and James around him. There were the Twelve and the other disciples. They formed circles of intimacy around Jesus. We too need these circles of intimacy, but it's a discipline."
"The enemies of intellectual liberty always try to present their case as a plea for discipline versus individualism. The issue truth-versus-untruth is as far as possible kept in the background."
"It is quite an old-fashioned fallacy to suppose that our objection to scepticism is that it removes the discipline from life. Our objection to scepticism is that it removes the motive power. Materialism is not a thing which destroys mere restraint. Materialism itself is the great restraint."
"The cycle of the machine is now coming to an end. Man has learned much in the hard discipline and the shrewd, unflinching grasp of practical possibilities that the machine has provided in the last three centuries: but we can no more continue to live in the world of the machine than we could live successfully on the barren surface of the moon."
"Where one person shapes their life by precept and example, there are a thousand who have shaped it by impulse and circumstances."
"It is only in a very quiet mind that great things are born; and a quiet mind does not come about through effort, through control, through discipline."
"A mind that is disciplined, controlled, is free within its own pattern; but that is not freedom. The end of discipline is conformity; its path leads to the known, and the known is never the free."
