“Schools are imperative,” he once said, “first of all because of the complexity of man’s organization. A man is unable to keep watch on the whole of himself, that is, all his different sides. Only school can do this, school methods, school DISCIPLINE — a man is much too lazy, he will do a great deal without the proper intensity, or he will do nothing at all while thinking that he is doing something; he will work with intensity on something that does not need intensity and will let those moments pass by when intensity is imperative. Then he spares himself; he is afraid of doing anything unpleasant. He will never attain the necessary intensity by himself. If you have observed yourselves in a proper way you will agree with this. If a man sets himself a task of some sort he very quickly begins to be indulgent with himself. He tries to accomplish his task in the easiest way possible and so on. This is not work. In work only super-efforts are counted, that is, beyond the normal, beyond the necessary; ordinary efforts are not counted.” Fragments: Seventeen

“At the same time ‘stop’ demands unconditional obedience, without any hesitations or doubts. And this makes it the invariable method for studying school DISCIPLINE. School DISCIPLINE is something quite different from military DISCIPLINE, for instance. In that DISCIPLINE everything is mechanical and the more mechanical it is the better. In this everything should be conscious because the aim consists in awakening consciousness. And for many people school DISCIPLINE is much more difficult than military DISCIPLINE. There it is always one and the same, here it is always different. Fragments: Seventeen

“Stop” had an immense, influence on the whole of our life, on the understanding of our work and our attitude towards it. First of all, attitude towards “stop” showed with undoubted accuracy what anyone’s attitude was to the work. People who had tried to evade work evaded “stop.” That is, either they did not hear the command to “stop” or they said that it did not directly refer .to them. Or, on the other hand, they were always prepared for a “stop,” they made no careless movements, they took no glasses of hot tea in their hands, they sat down and got up very quickly and so on. To a certain extent it was even possible to cheat with the “stop.” But of course this would be seen and would at once show who was sparing himself and who was able not to spare himself, able to take the work seriously, and who was trying to apply ordinary methods to it, to avoid difficulties, “to adapt themselves.” In exactly the same way “stop” showed the people who were incapable and undesirous of submitting to school DISCIPLINE and the people who were not taking it seriously. We saw quite clearly that without “stop” and other exercises which accompanied it, nothing whatever could be attained in a purely psychological way. Fragments: Seventeen

But I personally was particularly interested in observing the place that talk occupied in life. In my opinion our first fast consisted in everybody talking without stopping for several days about the fast, that is, everybody spoke about himself. In this respect I remember very early talks with a Moscow friend about the fact that voluntary silence could be the most severe DISCIPLINE to which a man could subject himself. But at that time we meant absolute silence. Even into this G. brought that wonderfully practical element which distinguished his system and his methods from anything I had known previously. Fragments: Seventeen