108 Discipline Quotes

In a world filled with distractions, maintaining discipline can be an extraordinary challenge. However, the power of discipline should never be underestimated. It is the backbone of self-improvement, personal growth, and the key ingredient in the recipe for success. Whether you're striving for professional achievements, personal goals, or simply seeking inner strength, discipline plays a crucial role. To inspire and motivate you on this journey, we have curated a collection of the top 108 discipline quotes. These words of wisdom from respected figures across various fields offer timeless insights that can help strengthen your resolve and keep you focused on your path. Allow these quotes to serve as daily reminders that with discipline, anything is achievable. Dive in and let the wisdom of the ages guide you toward a more disciplined and fulfilling life.

1. “Where did we ever get the crazy idea that in order to make children do better, first we have to make them feel worse? Think of the last time you felt humiliated or treated unfairly. Did you feel like cooperating or doing better?” - Jane Nelsen

2. “If you dedicate your attention to discipline in your life you become smarter while you are writing than while you are hanging out with your pals or in any other line of work.” - Russell Banks

3. “When an individual is motivated by great and powerful convictions of truth, then he disciplines himself, not because of the demands of the church, but because of the knowledge within his heart” - Gordon B. Hinckley

4. “Do not train a child to learn by force or harshness; but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each.” - Plato

5. “Selfishly, perhaps, Catti-brie had determined that the assassin was her own business. He had unnerved her, had stripped away years of training and discipline and reduced her to the quivering semblance of a frightened child. But she was a young woman now, no more a girl. She had to personally respond to that emotional humiliation, or the scars from it would haunt her to her grave, forever paralyzing her along her path to discover her true potential in life.” - R.A. Salvatore

6. “It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.” - Edmund Burke

7. “In practice we always base our preparations against an enemy on the assumption that his plans are good; indeed, it is right to rest our hopes not on a belief in his blunders, but on the soundness of our provisions. Nor ought we to believe that there is much difference between man and man, but to think that the superiority lies with him who is reared in the severest school.” - Thucydides

8. “Self-control is the chief element in self-respect, and self-respect is the chief element in courage.” - Thucydides

9. “The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.” - David Foster Wallace

10. “Do not bite at the bait of pleasure till you know there is no hook beneath it.” - Thomas Jefferson

11. “Your kids require you most of all to love them for who they are, not to spend your whole time trying to correct them.” - Bill Ayers

12. “You can't make your kids do anything. All you can do is make them wish they had. And then, they will make you wish you hadn't made them wish they had.” - Marshall B. Rosenberg

13. “True freedom is impossible without a mind made free by discipline.” - Mortimer J. Adler

14. “Discipline imposed from the outside eventually defeats when it is not matched by desire from within.” - Dawson Trotman

15. “My father liked me, when I wasna being an idiot. And he loved me, too -- enough to beat the daylights out of me when I was being an idiot. Jamie Fraser” - Diana Gabaldon

16. “But… all I said was that I was scared." After what you got to experience? That's smart, kid," I said. "I'm scared, too. Every time something like this happens, it scares me. But being strong doesn't get you through. Being smart does. I've beaten people and things who were stronger than I was, because they didn't use their heads, or because I used what I had better than they did. It isn't about muscle, kiddo, magical or otherwise. It's about your attitude. About your mind." She nodded slowly and said, "About doing things for the right reasons." You don't throw down like this just because you're strong enough to do it," I said. "You do it because you don't have much choice. You do it because it's unacceptable to walk away, and still live with yourself later." She stared at me for a second, and then her eyes widened. "Otherwise, you're using power for the sake of using power." I nodded. "And power tends to corrupt. It isn't hard to love using it, Molly. You've got to go in with the right attitude or…" Or the power starts using you," she said. She'd heard the argument before, but this was the first time she said the words slowly, thoughtfully, as if she'd actually understood them, instead of just parroting them back to me. Then she looked up. "That's why you do it. Why you help people. You're using the power for someone other than yourself.” - Jim Butcher

17. “Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not. It is the first lesson that ought to be learned and however early a man's training begins, it is probably the last lesson that he learns thoroughly.” - Thomas Henry Huxley

18. “football is like life - it requires perserverance, self-denial, hard work, sacrifice, dedication and respect for authority.” - Vince Lombardi

19. “DisciplineI am old and I have hadmore than my share of good and bad. I've had love and sorrow, seen sudden deathand been left alone and of love bereft. I thought I would never love againand I thought my life was grief and pain. The edge between life and death was thin, but then I discovered discipline. I learned to smile when I felt sad, I learned to take the good and the bad, I learned to care a great deal morefor the world about me than before. I began to forget the "Me" and "I"and joined in life as it rolled by: this may not mean sheer ecstasybut is better by far than "I" and "Me.” - Meryl Gordon

20. “Discipline is a symbol of caring to a child.He needs guidance.If there is love, there is no such thing as being too tough with a child. A parent must also not be afraid to hang himself. If you have never been hated by your child, you have never been a parent.” - Bette Davis

21. “In Astrology, the moon, among its other meanings, has that of "the common people," who submit (they know not why) to any independent will that can express itself with sufficient energy. The people who guillotined the mild Louis XVI died gladly for Napoleon. The impossibility of an actual democracy is due to this fact of mob-psychology. As soon as you group men, they lose their personalities. A parliament of the wisest and strongest men in the nation is liable to behave like a set of schoolboys, tearing up their desks and throwing their inkpots at each other. The only possibility of co-operation lies in discipline and autocracy, which men have sometimes established in the name of equal rights.” - Aleister Crowley

22. “The overman...Who has organized the chaos of his passions, given style to his character, and become creative. Aware of life's terrors, he affirms life without resentment. ” - Friedrich Nietzsche

23. “When a child hits a child, we call it aggression.When a child hits an adult, we call it hostility.When an adult hits an adult, we call it assault.When an adult hits a child, we call it discipline.” - Haim G. Ginott

24. “Misbehavior and punishment are not opposites that cancel each other - on the contrary they breed and reinforce each other.” - Haim G. Ginott

25. “What you keep before your eyes will affect you.” - Joel Osteen

26. “As we grow detached from things, we come (with God's help) to master our desires, and we give the mastery over to God. Discipline and divine grace heal the intellect and the will of the effects of concupiscence. We can begin to see things clearly.” - Scott Hahn

27. “Parents teach children discipline for two different, indeed diametrically opposed, reasons: to render the child submissive to them and to make him independent of them. Only a self-disciplined person can be obedient; and only such a person can be autonomous.” - Thomas Stephen Szasz

28. “True discipline is really just self-remembering; no forcing or fighting is necessary.” - Charles Eisenstein

29. “As his mind becomes purer and his emotions come under control, his thoughts become clearer and his instincts truer. As he learns to live more and more in harmony with his higher Self, his body's natural intuition becomes active of itself. The result is that false desires and unnatural instincts which have been imposed upon it by others or by himself will become weaker and weaker and fall away entirely in time. This may happen without any attempt to undergo an elaborate system of self-discipline on his part: yet it will affect his way of living, his diet, his habits. False cravings like the craving for smoking tobacco will vanish of their own accord; false appetites like the appetite for alcoholic liquor or flesh food will likewise vanish; but the more deep-seated the desire, the longer it will take to uproot it--except in the case of some who will hear and answer a heroic call for an abrupt change.” - Paul Brunton

30. “Why is discipline important? Discipline teaches us to operate by principle rather than desire. Saying no to our impulses (even the ones that are not inherently sinful) puts us in control of our appetites rather than vice versa. It deposes our lust and permits truth, virtue, and integrity to rule our minds instead.” - John MacArthur Jr.

31. “The most powerful control we can ever attain, is to be in control of ourselves.” - Chris Page

32. “Good habits are worth being fanatical about.” - John Irving

33. “Have your dream...What you need now more than anything is discipline. Cast off mere words. Words turn into stone. (from Thailand)” - Haruki Murakami

34. “Why are those who are notoriously undisciplined and unmoral also most contemptuous of religion and morality? They are trying to solace their own unhappy lives by pulling the happy down to their own abysmal depths.” - Fulton J. Sheen

35. “Discipline yourself and others won't need to.” - John Wooden

36. “Training moments occur when both parents and children do their jobs. The parent's job is to make the rule. The child's job is to break the rule. The parent then corrects and disciplines. The child breaks the rule again, and the parent manages the consequences and empathy that then turn the rule into reality and internal structure for the child.” - Dr. Henry Cloud & Dr. John Townsend

37. “...[I]ron discipline does not preclude but presupposes criticism and contest of opinion within the Party. Least of all does it mean that discipline must be 'blind'. On the contrary, iron discipline does not preclude but presupposes conscious and voluntary submission, for only conscious discipline can be truly iron discipline.” - Joseph Stalin

38. “Discipline isn't about showing a dog who's boss; it's about takingresponsibility for a living creature you have brought into your world.” - Cesar Millan

39. “You need three things to become a successful novelist: talent, luck and discipline. Discipline is the one element of those three things that you can control, and so that is the one that you have to focus on controlling, and you just have to hope and trust in the other two.” - Michael Chabon

40. “One painful duty fulfilled makes the next plainer and easier.” - Helen Keller

41. “Whether our action is wholesome or unwholesome depends on whether that action or deed arises from a disciplined or undisciplined state of mind. It is felt that a disciplined mind leads to happiness and an undisciplined mind leads to suffering, and in fact it is said that bringing about discipline within one's mind is the essence of the Buddha's teaching.” - Dalai Lama XIV

42. “Hierarchy and discipline gave shape to the world;that was what he had always believed.Life was made easy by adherence toa rigid structure.But maybe that only really worked when you were at the top of the ladder,when you were doing well.The further down the rungs you went,the more of a victim of circumstances you became and the less it mattered whether or not you were in control.” - James Lovegrove

43. “Discipline isn't a dirty word. Far from it. Discipline is the one thing that separates us from chaos and anarchy. Discipline implies timing. It's the precursor to good behavior, and it never comes from bad behavior. People who associate discipline with punishment are wrong: with discipline, punishment is unnecessary.” - Buck Brannaman

44. “The war had made some into libertines and some into serious, sober men.” - Charles Bracelen Flood

45. “A Christian understanding of the world sees a child's character not as genetically determined but as shaped to a significant degree by parental discipleship and discipline.” - Russell D. Moore

46. “The notion of freedom proclaimed by the modern world is anti-discipline. But true freedom cannot be separated from discipline.” - Matthew Kelly

47. “Always Remember to take your Vitamins: Take your Vitamin A for ACTION, Vitamin B for Belief, Vitamin C for Confidence ,Vitamin D for Discipline, Vitamin E for Enthusiasm!!” - Pablo

48. “The root of impatience in discipline is really the same as that of overindulgence. In both instances, parents want to make up for lost time, to speed up a process that takes time.” - Russell D. Moore

49. “Next morning I went over to Paul’s for coffee and told him I had finished. “Good for you,” he said without looking up. “Start the next one today.” - Steven Pressfield

50. “We must do our work for its own sake, not for fortune or attention or applause.” - Steven Pressfield

51. “This is the other secret that real artists know and wannabe writers don’t. When we sit down each day and do our work, power concentrates around us. The Muse takes note of our dedication. She approves. We have earned favor in her sight. When we sit down and work, we become like a magnetized rod that attracts iron filings. Ideas come. Insights accrete.” - Steven Pressfield

52. “There are so many charlatans in the world of education. They teach for a couple of years, come up with a few clever slogans, build their websites, and hit the lecture circuit. In this fast-food-society, simple solutions to complex problems are embraced far too often. We can do better. I hope that people who read this book realize that true excellence takes sacrifice, mistakes, and enormous amounts of effort. After all, there are no shortcuts.” - Rafe Esquith

53. “Freedom or prison--what's the difference? A man must develop unwavering will power subject only to his reason.” - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

54. “We need patient people who are able to endure the toughest disciplines.” - Samael Aun Weor

55. “Whoever submits himself to a super-discipline can expect great triumphs.” - Samael Aun Weor

56. “In peace-armies discipline meant the hunt, not of an average but of an absolute; the hundred per cent standard in which the ninety-nine were played down to the level of the weakest man on parade…. The deeper the discipline, the lower was the individual excellence; also the more sure the performance. – T. E. Lawrence Seven Pillars of Wisdom” - T.E. Lawrence

57. “Tough love may be tough to give, but it is a necessity of life and assurance of positive growth.” - T.F. Hodge

58. “[God] disciplines us for our good, that we may share His holiness.” - Scott Hahn

59. “Every man has a specific skill, whether it is discovered or not, that more readily and naturally comes to him than it would to another, and his own should be sought and polished. He excels best in his niche - originality loses its authenticity in one's efforts to obtain originality.” - Criss Jami

60. “I always make sure that the world will prove me right. It gives me the freedom to contradict myself.” - Criss Jami

61. “Showing a lack of self-control is in the same vein granting authority to others: 'Perhaps I need someone else to control me.” - Criss Jami

62. “Free curiosity has greater power to stimulate learning than rigorous coercion. Nevertheless, the free ranging flux of curiosity is channeled by discipline under Your Law.” - St. Augustine of Hippo

63. “Now public business takes up so much of my time that I must get time a Sundays or a nights to look after my own matters.” - Samuel Pepys

64. “You will never have a greater or lesser dominion than that over yourself...the height of a man's success is gauged by his self-mastery; the depth of his failure by his self-abandonment. ...And this law is the expression of eternal justice. He who cannot establish dominion over himself will have no dominion over others.” - Leonardo da Vinci

65. “It was more than just material prosperity. America in 1960 was a country where restraint and boundaries were the natural conditions in all arenas. People married younger and stayed married; even with those added twenty-eight million, there were fewer divorces in 1960 than there had been a decade earlier. People did not have children unless they were married—only 2.5 percent of children were born out of wedlock, though the number in black households was disturbingly high—some 20 percent.” - Jeff Greenfield

66. “The problem with patience and discipline is that it requires both of them to develop each of them.” - Thomas M. Sterner

67. “The best measure of a spiritual life is not its ecstasies but its obedience.” - Oswald Chambers

68. “If soldiers are punished before they have grown attached to you, they will not prove submissive;and, unless submissive, then will be practically useless. If, when the soldiers have become attachedto you, punishments are not enforced, they will still be unless.” - Sun Tzu

69. “We may well find that if we are to fulfill God's mandate on earth, we will need to communicate less often so we can communicate more. We will need to forsake the ease and the pace of quantity for the reflective significance of quality.” - Tim Challies

70. “We cultivate our feelings the way we cultivate a garden: we can't entirely prevent weeds from coming up, but we can take care to remove them before they do much harm.” - Phillip Cary

71. “I do not have it in for relativism. In many respects I find it a fascinating, even attractive, alternative. It engenders epistemological humility, defeats an arrogant pomposity in belief, even promotes a sort of democratic ideal in matters of knowledge. Perhaps its most comforting feature is that it requires no hard work at all in the matter of justifying beliefs.” - David L. Wolfe

72. “Alex understood such discipline. He knew the rarity of it, and the cost. And on the rare occasions when he happened to touch her, he did wonder what else she might have been, if she had not been so determined to be typical.” - Meredith Duran

73. “Men need discipline! Countries need discipline! World needs discipline! He who wants to be successful needs discipline! Be a man of discipline!” - Mehmet Murat ildan

74. “If you only write when inspired, you may be a fairly decent poet, but you'll never be a novelist.” - Neil Gaiman

75. “If you wish to be out front, then act as if you were behind.” - Lao-Tsze

76. “When God grabs you by the scruff of the neck then although theoretically you have a freedom to say 'no', in another sense, actually, you can't say no because it's like Jeremiah. 'God, you have cheated me. You called me to be a prophet against the people that I love, and all that I proclaim is words of doom and judgement.' And yet if I say "I will shut up", I can't.” - Desmond Tutu

77. “To procrastinate obedience is to disobey God.” - Randy Alcorn

78. “A disciple does not ask, "How much can I keep?" but, "How much more can I give?" Whenever we start to get comfortable with our level of giving, it's time to raise it again.” - Randy Alcorn

79. “A mode of conduct, a standard of courage, discipline, fortitude and integrity can do a great deal to make a woman beautiful.” - Jacqueline Bisset

80. “Too often we forget that discipline really means to teach, not to punish. A disciple is a student, not a recipient of behavioural consequences.” - Daniel J. Siegel

81. “To make 2013 (or any other)your year, keep it simple:1) Count your blessings first2) Whatever you did last year, Do it better3) Go step by step, One day at a time.4) Create/make your own opportunities.5) Believe in your abilities at all times,6) Qutting is not an option. Keep Going.7) Finish what you started” - Pablo

82. “Most of us don't mind doing what we ought to do when it doesn't interfere with what we want to do, but it takes discipline and maturity to do what we ought to do whether we want to or not.” - Joseph B. Wirthlin

83. “Desires to which we cling closely can easily prevent us from being what we ought to be and can be; and on the other hand, desires repeatedly mastered for the sake of present duty make us richer.Lack of desire is poverty.” - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

84. “All writing is discipline, but screenwriting is a drill sergeant.” - Robert McKee

85. “This is the secret to mastering any discipline: as you conquer one, you'll find it easier to tackle another.” - Jeff Goins

86. “There is something in human pride that can stand big troubles, but we need the supernatural grace and power of God to stand by us in the little things. The tiniest detail in which we obey has all the omnipotent power of the grace of God behind it. When we do our duty, not for duty’s sake, but because we believe that God is engineering our circumstances in that way, then at the very point of our obedience the whole superb grace of God is ours.” - Oswald Chambers

87. “If there is no element of asceticism in our lives, if we give free rein to the desires of the flesh (taking care of course to keep within the limits of what seems permissible to the world), we shall find it hard to train for the service of Christ. When the flesh is satisfied it is hard to pray with cheerfulness or to devote oneself to a life of service which calls for much self-renunciation.” - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

88. “To not say all that can be said is the secret of discipline and economy.” - Dejan Stojanovic

89. “Give me the discipline to get rid of the stuff that's not important, the freedom to savor the stuff that gives me joy, and the patience not to worry about the stuff that's messy but not hurting anybody.” - Vinita Hampton Wright

90. “There are many whose tongues might govern multitudes, if they could govern their tongues.” - Prentice

91. “You will know as much of God, and only as much of God, as you are willing to put into practice.” - Eric Liddell

92. “Simply to render oneself able to understand what other Christian thinkers have themselves come to understand and to more or less felicitously communicate requires that one's mind not be a blank slate but already properly formed, disciplined, and exercised.” - Gregory B. Sadler

93. “Discipline is a given; the choice is whether it is applied internally or externally.” - Orrin Woodward

94. “A disciplined mind leads to happiness, and an undisciplined mind leads to suffering.” - Dalai Lama XIV

95. “Among men, it seems, historically at any rate, the processes of coordination and disintegration follow each other with great regularity, and the index of the coordination is the measure of the disintegration which follows. There is no mob like a group of well-drilled soldiers when they have thrown off their discipline. And there is no lostness like that which comes to a man when a perfect and certain pattern has dissolved about him. There is no hater like one who has greatly loved.” - John Steinbeck

96. “Confidence is a pencil best sharpened with paper.” - Kale Burton

97. “He was too explosive for her to touch him so intimately. It would lead to the wrong things. And places he'd banned himself from. As her protector, he had to stay away from her. That was how it worked. This, he could not stray from. Not again. Even if it killed him.” - Jennifer Lowery

98. “Under a bad leadership Serbs are capable of committing the most terrible atrocities; under good leaders we can do great deeds. It's like a field - if it's not cared for, the weeds will take over. But if you tend it, water and feed the seeds, you will read a bountiful harvest. Serbs are lazy, we lack discipline and have no capacity for self-criticism." With Their Backs to the World” - Seierstad Åsne

99. “Children cannot develop a sense of inner discipline if all of the control comes from the outside.” - Babara Coloroso

100. “Small disciplines repeated with consistency every day lead to great achievements gained slowly over time.” - John C. Maxwell

101. “You will never change your life until you change something you do daily.” - John C. Maxwell

102. “If you do the things you need to do when you need to do them, then someday you can do the things you want do when you want to do them.” - John C. Maxwell

103. “To discipline your body, you need a disciplined mind!” - Mehmet Murat ildan

104. “But should we accept this negative view of power? Is power all bad? Specifically, can Christians share in this devaluation of power and discipline as inherently evil? Can we who claim to be disciples - who are called and predestined to be conformed to the likeness of the Son (Rom. 8:29) - be opposed to discipline and formation as such? Can we who are called to be subject to the Lord of life really agree with the liberal Enlightenment notion of the autonomous self? Are we not above all called to subject ourselves to our Domine and conform to his image? Of course, we are called not to conform to the patterns of 'this world' (Rom. 12:2) or to our previous evil desires (1 Peter 1:14), but that is a call not to nonconformity as such but rather to an alternative conformity through a counterformation in Christ, a transformation and renewal directed toward conformity to his image. By appropriating the liberal Enlightenment notion of negative freedom and participating in its nonconformist resistance to discipline (and hence a resistance to the classical spiritual disciplines), Christians are in fact being conformed to the patterns of this world (contra Rom. 12:2).” - James K.A. Smith

105. “Discipline is aimed at formation for a specific end, and that end is determined by our founding narrative.” - James K.A. Smith

106. “Sweetest of all is liberty. This we have chosen and this we pay for. We have embraced the laws of Lykurgus, and they are stern laws. They have schooled us to scorn the life of leisure, which this rich land of ours would bestow upon us if we wished, and instead to enroll ourselves in the academy of discipline and sacrifice. Guided by these laws, our fathers for twenty generations have breathed the blessed air of freedom and have paid the bill in full when it was presented. We, their sons, can do no less.” - Steven Pressfield

107. “Not every affection which seems good is to be immediately followed. Neither is every opposite affection to be immediately avoided. Sometimes it is expedient to use restraint even in good desires and wishes, lest through importunity you fall into distraction of mind, lest through want of discipline you become a stumbling block to others.” - Thomas A. Kempis

108. “Once upon a time, this idea of having a trained, disciplined, cultivated memory was not nearly so alien as it would seem to us to be today.” - joshua foer