Emotions & Self-control quotes for UPSC & State PCS

Where there is fear there is aggression.

We reason deeply, when we forcibly feel.

Let no man pull you so low as to hate him.

There is no disease so destructive as lust.

Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.

Fear of evil is greater than the evil itself.

A good indignation brings out all one's powers.

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.

Live within; be not shaken by outward happenings.

Too long a sacrifice Can make a stone of the heart.

Keep cool: it will be all one a hundred years hence.

Accept in an unruffled spirit that which is inevitable.

Hatred, as well as love, renders its votaries credulous.

It is easier to resist at the beginning than at the end.

Remember, today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday.

Abstinence is as easy to me as temperance would be difficult.

To be angry, is to revenge the fault of others upon ourselves.

You can have no dominion greater or less than that over yourself.

One cannot be spiritual as long as one has shame, hatred, or fear.

There is a wisdom of the Head, and … there is a wisdom of the Heart.

The first advice is to slow down, and not follow your first impulses.

What is anger? A lust for revenge. What is hatred? An anger grown old.

That man has reached immortality who is disturbed by nothing material.

Malice sucks up the greatest part of its own venom, and poisons itself.

Control your tongue, for from it flow the greatest evils of human life.

Anger kills both laughter and joy; What greater foe is there than anger?

We are masters of the unsaid words, but slaves of those we let slip out.

Hatred and anger are the greatest poison to the happiness of a good mind.

I shall revenge myself in the cruelest way you can imagine. I shall forget it.

All passions that suffer themselves to be relished and digested are but moderate.

A mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It makes the hand bleed that uses it.

To accept it without arrogance, to let it go with indifference. (Hays translation)

Ambition has its disappointments to sour us, but never the good fortune to satisfy us.

It is indeed foolish to be unhappy now because you may be unhappy at some future time.

You must learn to be still in the midst of activity and to be vibrantly alive in repose.

No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.

Human beings have a demonstrated talent for self-deception when their emotions are stirred.

How much more damage anger and grief do than the things that cause them. (Hays translation)

The wound that’s made by fire will heal, But the wound that’s made by tongue will never heal.

Men are quick to praise and quick to blame; so pay no heed to what others speak of you. (1023)

Everything that liberates our mind without at the same time imparting self-control is pernicious.

The lion who breaks the enemy's ranks is a minor hero compared to the lion who overcomes himself.

Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.

If you are not already dead, forgive. Rancor is heavy, it is worldly; leave it on earth: die light.

Just as a solid rock is not shaken by the storm, even so the wise are not affected by praise or blame.

Not to display anger or other emotions. To be free of passion and yet full of love. (Hays translation)

For a sentimentalist is simply one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it.

One cool judgment is worth a thousand hasty counsels. The thing to do is to supply light and not heat.

But still anger ought be far from us, for nothing is able to be done rightly nor judiciously with anger.

Choose not to be harmed—and you won't feel harmed. Don't feel harmed—and you haven't been. (Hays translation)

I would permit no man, no matter what his colour might be, to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.

Self-pity in its early stages is as snug as a feather mattress. Only when it hardens does it become uncomfortable.

The degree of one's emotion varies inversely with one's knowledge of the facts – the less you know the hotter you get.

Enjoying things which are pleasant; that is not the evil: it is the reducing of our moral self to slavery by them that is.

An irrational fear should never be simply let alone, but should be gradually overcome by familiarity with its fainter forms.

Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.

God turns you from one feeling to another and teaches by means of opposites, so that you will have two wings to fly, not one.

Greater in battle than the man who would conquer a thousand-thousand men, is he who would conquer just one — himself. (Verse 103)

Remember that there is always a limit to self-indulgence but none to self-restraint, and let us daily progress in that direction.

He whose intellect overcomes his desire is higher than the angels; he whose desire overcomes his intellect is less than an animal.

The wise man should restrain his senses like the crane and accomplish his purpose with due knowledge of his place, time and ability.

If by leaving a small pleasure one sees a great pleasure, let a wise man leave the small pleasure, and look to the great. (Verse 290)

Translation: If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us.

Use, do not abuse; as the wise man commands. I flee Epictetus and Petronius alike. Neither abstinence nor excess ever renders man happy.

Grief and disappointment give rise to anger, anger to envy, envy to malice, and malice to grief again, till the whole circle be completed.

Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.

When we hate our enemies, we are giving them power over us: power over our sleep, our appetites, our blood pressure, our health, and our happiness.

Some of your hurts you have cured, And the sharpest you still have survived, But what torments of grief you endured From evils which never arrived!

No pleasure is in itself evil, but the things which produce certain pleasures entail annoyances many times greater than the pleasures themselves. (8)

Emotion is the chief source of all becoming-conscious. There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion.

While grief is fresh, every attempt to divert only irritates. You must wait till grief be digested, and then amusement will dissipate the remains of it.

To be angry with a man is to hate him; to hate him is to wish him harm; but to wish him well, even if he has done you harm, is the mark of a great mind.

I had anger but never hate. Before the war, I was too busy studying to hate. After the war, I thought, What's the use? To hate would be to reduce myself.

One, who controls his anger when aroused, is like a clever driver who controls a fast going carriage; the others are like those who merely hold the reins.

I can become quite angry and burning in anger, but I have never been bitter. Bitterness is a corrosive, terrible acid. It just eats you and makes you sick. (1977)

To be choked with hate May well be of all evil chances chief. If there’s no hatred in a mind Assault and battery of the wind Can never tear the linnet from the leaf.

I think the two things most opposed to good counsel are haste and passion; haste usually goes hand in hand with folly, passion with coarseness and narrowness of mind.

A person who does not disturb the world and who cannot be disturbed by the world, who is free from exultation, jealousy, apprehension, and worry - he too is dear to Me.

I am rather inclined to silence, and whether that be wise or not, it is at least more unusual nowadays to find a man who can hold his tongue than to find one who cannot.

Develop the mind of equilibrium. You will always be getting praise and blame, but do not let either affect the poise of the mind: follow the calmness, the absence of pride.

He maintained this attitude up to the very end, and no man ever saw Socrates too much elated or too much depressed. Amid all the disturbance of Fortune, he was undisturbed.

Envy is a horrible thing. It is unlike all other kinds of suffering in that there is no disguising it, no elevating it into tragedy. It is more than merely painful, it is disgusting.

You may drink the ocean dry; you may uproot from its base the mountain Meru; you may swallow fire. But more diffucult than all these, oh Good One! is control over the mind. Panchadasi.

Fear is death, fear is sin, fear is hell, fear is unrighteousness, fear is wrong life. All the negative thoughts and ideas that are in the world have proceeded from this evil spirit of fear.

The senses, moving toward their appropriate objects, are producers of heat and cold, pleasure and pain, which come and go and are brief and changeable; these do thou endure, O son of Bharata!

When dealing with people, let us remember we are not dealing with creatures of logic. We are dealing with creatures of emotion, creatures bristling with prejudices and motivated by pride and vanity.

Someone despises me. That's their problem. Mine: not to do or say anything despicable. Someone hates me. Their problem. Mine: to be patient and cheerful with everyone, including them. (Hays translation)

When we come to nonattachment, then we can understand the marvelous mystery of the universe: how it is intense activity and at the same time intense peace, how it is work every moment and rest every moment.

Gentleness, as opposed to an irascible temper, greatly contributes to the tranquility and happiness of life, by preserving the mind from perturbation, and arming it against the assaults of calumny and malice.

We must have friendship for all; we must be merciful toward those that are in misery; when people are happy, we ought to be happy; and to the wicked we must be indifferent. These attitudes will make the mind peaceful.

I have learnt through bitter experience the one supreme lesson to conserve my anger, and as heat conserved is transmuted into energy, even so our anger controlled can be transmuted into a power which can move the world.

We speak not strictly and philosophically when we talk of the combat of passion and of reason. Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.

Success in investing doesn't correlate with I.Q. once you're above the level of 125. Once you have ordinary intelligence, what you need is the temperament to control the urges that get other people into trouble in investing.

Do you ask me whom I have conquered? Neither the Persians, nor the far-off Medes, nor any warlike race that lies beyond the Dahae; not these, but greed, ambition, and the fear of death that has conquered the conquerors of the world.

Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I've tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice.

O Madhusūdana, the mind is an unsteady thing. Hence it is unrealistic to expect evenness out of it as your system of yoga demands. O, Keśava, it is easier to control the wind than to try and control the fickle, unsettling, dominant, and stubborn mind.

The less passion there is, the better we work. The calmer we are, the better for us and the more the amount of work we can do. When we let loose our feelings, we waste so much energy, shatter our nerves, disturb our minds, and accomplish very little work.

Patience serves us against insults precisely as clothes do against the cold. For if you multiply your garments as the cold increases, that cold cannot hurt you; in the same way increase your patience under great offences, and they cannot hurt your feelings.

We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect; we apprehend it just as much by feeling. Therefore, the judgment of the intellect is, at best, only the half of truth, and must, if it be honest, also come to an understanding of its inadequacy.

Moreover, there is a victory and defeat—the first and best of victories, the lowest and worst of defeats—which each man gains or sustains at the hands, not of another, but of himself; this shows that there is a war against ourselves going on within every one of us.

One must learn to forgive and not to hold a hostile, bitter attitude of mind, which offends those about us and prevents us from enjoying ourselves; one must recognize human shortcomings and adjust himself to them rather than to be constantly finding fault with them.

Death induces the sensual person to say: Let us eat and drink, because tomorrow we shall die – but this is sensuality's cowardly lust for life, that contemptible order of things where one lives in order to eat and drink instead of eating and drinking in order to live.

There is a scale of virtues, and it is necessary, if one would mount the higher steps, to begin with the lowest; and the first virtue a man must acquire if he wishes to acquire the others, is that which the ancients called ἐγκράτεια or σωφροσύνη — i.e., self-control or moderation.

It is very pleasant to scratch an itching ring-worm, but the sensation one gets afterwards is very painful and intolerable. In the same way the pleasures of this world are very attractive in the beginning, but their consequences are terrible to contemplate and hard to endure. (548)

The whole idea of revenge and punishment is a childish day-dream. Properly speaking, there is no such thing as revenge. Revenge is an act which you want to commit when you are powerless and because you are powerless: as soon as the sense of impotence is removed, the desire evaporates also.

When one's mind dwells on the objects of Senses, fondness for them grows on him, from fondness comes desire, from desire anger. Anger leads to bewilderment, bewilderment to loss of memory of true Self, and by that intelligence is destroyed, and with the destruction of intelligence he perishes

The thing I fear most is fear.

Cynicism is humour in ill health.

What cannot be eschewed must be embraced

A sense of humour is a sense of proportion.

Drunkenness is nothing but voluntary madness.

Early and provident fear is the mother of safety.

The moment of greatest peril is the moment of victory.

He who knows does not speak; he who speaks does not know.

A sad soul can kill you quicker, far quicker, than a germ.

If you desire many things, many things will seem but a few.

Malice delights to blacken the characters of prominent men.

A good judge condemns wrongful acts, but does not hate them.

All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.

Nothing is little to him that feels it with great sensibility.

They who in trouble untroubled are Will trouble trouble itself.

Confidence comes back one at a time, but fear, is instantaneous.

Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken.

He who is not satisfied with a little, is satisfied with nothing.

A crust eaten in peace is better than a banquet partaken in anxiety.

If you are irritated by every rub, how will your mirror be polished?

We can shoot rockets into space but we can’t cure anger or discontent.

Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts, perhaps fear of a loss of power.

The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.

I do what is mine to do; the rest doesn't disturb me. (Hays translation)

Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.

Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.

Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment.

To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.

Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.

A propensity to hope and joy is real riches: One to fear and sorrow, real poverty.

Obstinacy is the result of the will forcing itself into the place of the intellect.

The first and the simplest emotion which we discover in the human mind is Curiosity.

Do not anticipate trouble, or worry about what may never happen. Keep in the sunlight.

If you are wholly perplexed and in straits, have patience, for patience is the key to joy.

It's the great mystery of human life that old grief passes gradually into quiet tender joy.

There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.

One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.

Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security.

Virtue is a state of war, and to live in it means one always has some battle to wage against oneself.

It is not because men's desires are strong that they act ill; it is because their consciences are weak.

I have always found that the less we speak of our intentions, the more chance there is of our realizing them.

Let us live happily then, not hating those who hate us! among men who hate us let us dwell free from hatred! (Verse 197)

Translation: This vice [Pride] does not measure happiness so much by its own conveniences, as by the miseries of others.

To be like the rock that the waves keep crashing over. It stands unmoved and the raging of the sea falls still around it.

A reproach can only hurt if it hits the mark. Whoever knows that he does not deserve a reproach can treat it with contempt.

Hate not the oppressor, for, if he is strong, thy hate increases his force of resistance; if he is weak, thy hate was needless.

Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction.

Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination.

Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power.

To live each day as though one's last, never flustered, never apathetic, never attitudinizing – here is perfection of character.

I am inclined to believe that few attacks either of ridicule or invective make much noise, but by the help of those they provoke.

The one thing our species is helpless against is good fortune. It first puzzles, then frightens, then angers, and finally destroys us.

There are more things, Lucilius, likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality.

For what is there more hideous than avarice, more brutal than lust, more contemptible than cowardice, more base than stupidity and folly?

I will not deny but that the best apology against false accusers is silence and sufferance, and honest deeds set against dishonest words.

Anyone who takes himself too seriously always runs the risk of looking ridiculous; anyone who can consistently laugh at himself does not.

Life is too short to waste The critic bite or cynic bark, Quarrel, or reprimand; 'Twill soon be dark; Up! mind thine own aim, and God speed the mark!

Just as a fletcher straightens an arrow shaft, even so the discerning man straightens his mind — so fickle and unsteady, so difficult to guard. (Verse 33)

One truly is the protector of oneself; who else could the protector be? With oneself fully controlled, one gains a mastery that is hard to gain. (Verse 160)

Don't let your heart depend on things That ornament life in a fleeting way! He who possesses, let him learn to lose, He who is fortunate, let him learn pain.

I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.

Do any deserve liberty who are not ready to give it to others? Let us calmly go to work, instead of dissipating our energy in unnecessary fretting and fuming.

That dependable courage, which in spite of the most sudden circumstances, nevertheless allows freedom of mind, of judgment and of decision, is exceedingly rare.

Nothing that grieves us can be called little: by the eternal laws of proportion a child's loss of a doll and a king's loss of a crown are events of the same size.

If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.

We disparage reason. But all the time it's what we're most concerned with. There's will as motor and there's will as brakes. Reason is, I suppose, the steering gear.

In every attempt there will be one set of men who will applaud, and another who will pick holes. Go on doing your own work, what need have you to reply to any party?

If any one is angry with you, meet his anger by returning benefits for it: a quarrel which is only taken up on one side falls to the ground: it takes two men to fight.

Trained mules are excellent, and so are thoroughbred horses from the Sindh, and so are great battle elephants, but more excellent than them all is a disciplined man. (Verse 322)

It is reconciled in policy; and politics ought to be adjusted, not to human reasonings, but to human nature; of which the reason is but a part; and by no means the greatest part.

It is a waste of time to be angry about my disability. One has to get on with life and I haven't done badly. People won't have time for you if you are always angry or complaining.

There were all kinds of things I was afraid of at first, ranging from grizzly bears to 'mean' horses and gun-fighters; but by acting as if I was not afraid I gradually ceased to be afraid.

Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.

The suffering man ought really 'to consume his own smoke'; there is no good in emitting smoke till you have made it into fire, — which, in the metaphorical sense too, all smoke is capable of becoming!

Unless we exercise our power to choose wisely, our actions will be determined by conditions. Our ultimate freedom is the right and power to decide how anybody or anything outside ourselves will affect us.

If one only wished to be Sad, this could be horrible for the rest of civilisation; but we wish to be happier than other people, and this is always difficult, for we believe others to be happier than they are.

All a man has is pride. Sometimes you have it so much it is a sin. We have all done things for pride that we knew were impossible. We didn't care. But a man must implement his pride with intelligence and care.

We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet.

Whatever an enemy might do to an enemy, or a foe to a foe, the ill-directed mind can do to you even worse. Whatever a mother, father or other kinsman might do for you, the well-directed mind can do for you even better.

Meanwhile, hold fast to this thought, and grip it close: yield not to adversity; trust not to prosperity; keep before your eyes the full scope of Fortune’s power, as if she would surely do whatever is in her power to do.

This happy state can only be obtained by a prudent care of the body, and a steady government of the mind. The diseases of the body are to be prevented by temperance, or cured by medicine, or rendered tolerable by patience.

Where men are the most sure and arrogant, they are commonly the most mistaken, and have there given reins to passion, without that proper deliberation and suspense, which can alone secure them from the grossest absurdities.

...undefiled by pleasures, invulnerable to any pain, untouched by arrogance, unaffected by meanness, an athlete in the greatest of all contests—the struggle not to be overwhelmed by anything that happens. (Hays translation)

By eating meagerly, you become clever and aware. And by eating gluttonously, you become foolish and idle. Your being full of misery is entirely from your gluttony. You will become less miserable if you become a sparse eater.

This I have seen in life—those who are overcautious about themselves fall into dangers at every step; those who are afraid of losing honor and respect, get only disgrace; and those who are always afraid of loss, always lose.

Concentrate every minute like a Roman—like a man—on doing what's in front of you with precise and genuine seriousness, tenderly, willingly, with justice. And on freeing yourself from all other distractions. (Hays translation)

Exercise dissipates tension, and tension is the enemy of serenity. I found that I worked better and thought more clearly when I was in good physical condition, and so training became one of the inflexible disciplines of my life.

We are product of neither nature nor nurture; we are a product of choice, because there is always a space between stimulus and response. As we wisely exercise our power to choose based on principles, the space will become larger.

Even in ordinary times there are very few of us who do not see the problems of life as through a glass, darkly; and when the glass is clouded by the murk of furious popular passion, the vision of the best and the bravest is dimmed.

I fervently wish no misery ever came near anyone; yet it is that alone that gives us an insight into the depths of our lives, does it not? In our moments of anguish, gates barred forever seem to open and let in many a flood of light.

If the light were not in your eyes, dear Mr. Brooks, you would understand better how happy your little Helen was when her teacher explained to her that the best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen nor even touched but just felt in the heart.

Those who have been once intoxicated with power, and have derived any kind of emolument from it, even though but for one year, never can willingly abandon it. They may be distressed in the midst of all their power; but they will never look to any thing but power for their relief.

We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. And history is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate.

Forgiveness is taking seriously the awfulness of what has happened when you are treated unfairly. It is opening the door for the other person to have a chance to begin again. Without forgiveness, resentment builds in us, a resentment which turns into hostility and anger. Hatred eats away at our well-being.