You don't have to control your thoughts; you just have to stop letting them control you.
Drag your thoughts away from your troubles... by the ears, by the heels, or any other way you can manage it.
Only man clogs his happiness with care, destroying what is with thoughts of what may be.
Much like the hands of a clock go nowhere fast, anxious thoughts run us round-and-round without taking us anywhere!
Remember always that there are two things which are more utterly incompatible even than oil and water, and these two are trust and worry. Can you call it trust, when you have given the saving and keeping of your soul into the hands of God, if day after day you are spending hours of anxious thought and questionings about the matter? When believers really trust anything, they cease to worry about the thing they have trusted.
Any anxious thought as to the means to be employed in the accomplishment of our purposes is quite unnecessary. If the end is already secured, then it follows that all the steps leading to it are secured also.
Thou silent power, whose welcome sway charms every anxious thought away; in whose divine oblivion drown'd, sore pain and weary toil grow mild, love is with kinder looks beguiled, and Grief forgets her fondly cherish'd wound; oh, whither hast thou flown, indulgent god? God of kind shadows and of healing dews, whom dost thou touch with thy Lethaean rod? Around whose temples now thy opiate airs diffuse?
Believing that anxious thoughts and feelings can restore order to your life is like using a chain-saw to fold your laundry.
Have you ever considered what anxious thought, what consummate knowledge of human nature, what dearly-bought experiences go into the making of an advertisement?
He that has no present Christ has a future, dark, chaotic, heaving with its destructive ocean; and over it there goes forever--black-pinioned winging its solitary and hopeless flight, the raven of his anxious thoughts, and finds no place to rest, and comes back again to the desolate ark with its foreboding croak of evil in the present and evil in the future.
Fairy tales are loved by the child not because the imagery he finds in them conforms to what goes on within him, but because--despite all the angry, anxious thoughts in his mind to which the fairy tale gives body and specific content--these stories always result in a happy outcome, which the child cannot imagine on his own.
Do not look forward to what may happen tomorrow; the same everlasting Father who cares for you today will take care of you tomorrow and every day. Either He will shield you from suffering, or He will give you unfailing strength to bear it. Be at peace, then, put aside all anxious thoughts and imaginations, and say continually: 'The Lord is my strength and my shield; my heart has trusted in Him and I am helped. He is not only with me but in me and I in Him.'
or simply:
