Self-Control

One might say self-control is the most important achievement we can attain. That many parents work harder to instill self-esteem than self-control in their children is a moral tragedy. And, ironically, no self-esteem can equal the self-esteem that derives from self-control.

Dennis Prager, The Rational Bible: Genesis: God, Creation, and Destruction, pg.67

Don't Let Words Control You

You will continue to suffer if you have an emotional reaction to everything that is said to you. True power is sitting back and observing things with logic. True power is restraint. If words control you that mean everyone else can control you. Breathe and allow things to pass.

Warren Buffett

Good Reasons to Remain a Virgin Until Marriage

There are many valid reasons that it may be a good thing to remain a virgin until later in life. Forgoing sex proves that one is disciplined enough to delay gratification for the sake of a greater good. It allows one to concentrate one’s efforts on one’s work and perhaps achieve greater professional success than one would if one were constantly scheming about how to bed one’s next partner, and it virtually guarantees that you’ll never catch an STD. If you’re a believing Christian, Jew, or Muslim, it gives you the security of knowing that you’re protected from committing any number of soul-damning sexual sins. If you’re an intellectually oriented atheist or agnostic, it frees you to live a life of the mind without becoming enslaved to the passions of the body. If you’re a human being with a living, beating heart, it saves you from the messiness, tedium, and soul-crushing heartbreak that so often accompanies romantic relationships.

Linking sex to lifelong, committed, married love—the very bond that much of the sexual revolution was intent on severing—can make sex truly wonderful.

Daniel Ross Goodman, “The War Against Abstinence: Blockers, American Pie, and the Last Great Sexual Taboo.”

Importance of Self-Control

I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who conquers his enemies; for the hardest victory is over self.

Aristotle

Do NOT Overfeed Children!

How many graves are filled, and funeral vaults crowded with little carcases which have been brought to untimely death by the foolish fondness of a parent, or a nurse, giving the young creature leave to eat everything they desire! Or if they happen by strength of constitution to survive this pestilence, how often do they grow up young gluttons, and place their happiness in the satisfaction of taste!  They are deaf to all the rules of virtue and abstinence all their lives, because they were never taught to deny themselves when they were young.  O it is a mean and shameful thing to be a slave to our taste, and to let this brutal appetite subdue reason, and govern the man! But if appetites must be gratified in the child, they will grow strong in the years of youth, and a thousand to one but they overpower the man also.

Isaac Watts, The Improvement of the Mind: A Supplement to Logic, pg.316

Teach Children Self-Control

Children should be instructed in the art of self-government.  They should be taught, as far as possible, to govern their thoughts; to use their wills to be determined by the light of their understandings, and not by headstrong and foolish humor; they should learn to keep the lower powers of nature under command of their reason; they should be instructed to regulate their senses, their imagination, their appetites, and their passions.

Isaac Watts, The Improvement of the Mind: A Supplement to Logic, pg.314