Control Quotes

You have 100% control over yourself, and your life. It is up to you to stop giving your power away, and to decide what you want to be, do, or have...and go after it.

~ B. Dave Walters

You want to be competent? she thought. You want to learn to be in control of what goes on around you, rather than just being pushed around? Then you’ll have to learn to deal with failure.

~ Brandon Sanderson

Damage control is part of life. It would be better to never make a mistake, but once it's made it's best to handle it with grace and humility. Sometimes that shows others more than our failures ever could.

~ Rev. Kellen Roggenbuck

A relationship run by rules, instead of love is a relationship that is on the road to failure.

~ Shannon L. Alder

Personal Responsibility is the individual desire to be in charge or in control of an action or situation.

~ Sunday Adelaja

We all have a sea inside us, can you hear it? Can you hear the ocean roaring?

~ Dianna Hardy

A breakdown is when you've exhausted every option and have no choice but to accept the fact that you are powerless to create the outcome you want. A breakthrough has the same definition.

~ Paul Colaianni

Here’s what I believe. We have control over ourselves at every single moment. We don’t control the world. We don’t control other people (or at least, we shouldn’t.) But we are in control of our experience at all times.

~ Stephen Lovegrove

Only with calmness can you control your emotions.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Why so eager to jump in and direct someone else's life when you can't stick to your own goals and resolutions?

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

It seems that many of us have the goal of making other people conform to our desires and expectations, whether or not we would admit to such a thing. We see this especially in parents who get upset because their children don’t conform to their expectations, but instead follow a pattern of development that is unique and individual. We often use language with peers and colleagues that encourages them to change their ways of doing things to our ways of doing things: “You should” and “You ought to” are usually presented as advice, but in the end they really are about changing someone else’s ways of doing things. And we may offer this “advice” in a spirit of love and helpfulness, but we can be much more helpful when we help them to find their own ways of changing things. It can be incredibly freeing to spend an entire day not looking to try to change the behaviors, beliefs, or attitudes of other human beings. If we approach life in this way, we may learn much about the other people in our lives instead of trying to make them be like us.

~ Tom Walsh

We each have our own ways of sabotaging & keeping ourselves down…Do we need to remain the victim so strongly that we pull the ceiling down upon our own heads? There is a comfort in the familiar. Also, it is important to us to be in control because as children being abused we were not at all in control. In self-sabotage we can be both the victim & the victimizer.

~ Maureen Brady

Healing is a different type of pain. It’s the pain of becoming aware of the power of one’s strength and weakness, of one’s capacity to love or do damage to oneself and to others, and of how the most challenging person to control in life is ultimately yourself.

~ Caroline Myss

Survivors often develop an exaggerated need for control in their adult relationships. It’s the only way they feel safe. They also struggle with commitment—saying yes in a relationship means being trapped in yet another family situation where abuse might take place. So the survivor panics as her relationship gets closer, certain that something terrible is going to happen. She pulls away, rejects, or tests her partner all the time.

~ Laura Davis

The darkness agrees with me. It asks me to release it, as loud as a roar and as quiet as a whisper. I remember what my sister said long ago: You must control the darkness. You can’t ever give in to it. But the shadows want to make me happy, and I deserve a little happiness

~ Justina Ireland

I hope that, whatever happens within the publishing industry, because of the increased control writers have of their own careers, better sales information and the advent of the internet, that ultimately this change in our working environment will be a change for the better.

~ Sara Sheridan

..I buried myself in accomplishments, because with accomplishments, I believed I could control things, I could squeeze in every last piece of happiness before I got sick and died.. which I figured was my natural fate.

~ Mitch Albom

Maybe she hated being out of control, knowing that someone or something else was dictating her fate. Because it's really not fair. A drunk driver runs a red light, and you end up dead. A guy in a movie theater coughs on you, and you catch some rare, fatal disease. You sit in class minding your own business, and there's the kid from sixth period holding a gun in his hand. Why should other people be in control? Why should someone else get to choose when you die?

~ Chelsea Sedoti

They say that to escape reality is when you sleep, but when you sleep your sub conscious is in control of your dreams. For me to escape reality is when I read and write. When I read the world around me doesn't exist. The world in the story does and when I write I'm in control. Think of it as the author is the god of the world that they created. They set the characters fate.

~ Emily Aka Xxxwhitelipsxxx

From this day forward, I vowedto myself, I was in control of my life. Not fate, notGod, not even Chris was ever again going to tell me what to do, ordominate me in any way. From this day forward, I was my own person, totake what I would, when I would, and I would answer only to myself.

~ V.c. Andrews

There are things which cannot be carried through even with the good will of everybody concerned

~ Karen Blixen

You can only control so much, in the end the rest is up to fate.

~ Ziad K. Abdelnour

If someone slaps you on one cheek, offer the other cheek also...but of course if you were able to stand soberly after the first slap.

~ Toba Beta

There is no difference between the principles, policies and practical results of socialism—and those of any historical or prehistorical tyranny. Socialism is merely democratic absolute monarchy—that is, a system of absolutism without a fixed head, open to seizure of power by all corners, by any ruthless climber, opportunist, adventurer, demagogue or thug.

~ Ayn Rand

I will erase this world of yours with such magnificence of my presence that your vision will remain no more, your eyes fading to darkness and your soul barren before me, in my grasp that I shall corrupt to a slave of mine.

~ Saim Cheeda

Growing economies are built by billions of actors behaving according to their own interests, coordinated through institutions that no one in particular created.Realizing this requires humility, a trait that is in short supply among would-be dictators, politicians, and bureaucrats, which is precisely why these groups are the proven enemies of prosperity in all times and places.

~ Jeffrey Tucker

It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

~ James Madison

There was a time, when we were illiterate, insane and inhuman, and we needed religion to control the masses for the good or evil, but now we are in the time of the technological advancement, we are educated and we must let go off religion.

~ M.f. Moonzajer

I have heard that, with some persons, temperance – that is, moderation – is almost impossible; and if abstinence be an evil (which some have doubted), no one will deny that excess is a greater. Some parents have entirely prohibited their children from tasting intoxicating liquors; but a parent’s authority cannot last for ever; children are naturally prone to hanker after forbidden things; and a child, in such a case, would be likely to have a strong curiosity to taste, and try the effect of what has been so lauded and enjoyed by others, so strictly forbidden to himself – which curiosity would generally be gratified on the first convenient opportunity; and the restraint once broken, serious consequences might ensue.

~ Anne Brontë

When we operate on the basis of the will to control, we are aware of only one kind of evil: the failure of existence to conform to the plan we have for it.

~ Jerome A. Miller

Is is as if life or reality itself has had it in mind all along to unravel the very design i have been trying all along to impose on it.

~ Jerome A. Miller

What we work so hard to avoid is the shattering of our lives by horrors we know we will be helpless to control.

~ Jerome A. Miller

Now, however open a person manages to be, there is one possibility to which he remains as closed as ever: the possibility that when he uncovers his deepest anxieties he will find hidden inside them certain horrifying truths which his whole effort to control his life has been designed to keep repressed.

~ Jerome A. Miller

Through understanding comes control. Through ignorance one goes on forcing and suppressing. Always do everything with understanding, and you never harm yourself or anybody else.

~ Osho

One of the bigger mistakes of our time, I suppose, was preaching the demonization of all judgment without teaching how to judge righteously. We now live in an age where, apart from the inability to bear even good judgment when it so passes by, still everyone, inevitably, has a viral opinion (judgment) about everything and everyone, but little skill in good judgment as its verification or harness.

~ Criss Jami

Measurement is the first step that leads to control and eventually to improvement. If you can’t measure something, you can’t understand it. If you can’t understand it, you can’t control it. If you can’t control it, you can’t improve it.

~ H. James Harrington

We kept our heads down and did our jobs. We controlled the only thing we could, which was the show. We did the thing. Because remember, the talking about the thing isn't the thing. The doing of the thing is the thing.

~ Amy Poehler

Free yourself from fruitlessly worrying about things you can’t control and put your energy towards the things you can. Seize the day and take effective action on things you can change.

~ Steve Maraboli

Life is not about control or making things happen in the ways we think they should happen. In fact, it's rather arrogant for us to be on this planet that's been here for so long and expect to be able to control life on it. If we want to see changes, then our task is to set things in motion, not to micromanage and make them happen in the ways we think they should. If we have something that is possessing us, such as alcohol or our television sets or our cell phones, then it could be time to let it go and move on with our lives. If we're holding on to resentment and anger, we're simply raising our own stress levels and blood pressure, but we're not contributing anything positive to the situation--and it's time to let it go.

~ Tom Walsh

Start to exercise a firm control over what influences your experiences before situations control you.

~ Steven Redhead