quotations about habit
Each year one vicious habit rooted out,
In time might make the worst Man good throughout.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
Poor Richard's Almanack, 1738
To learn new habits is everything, for it is to reach the substance of life. Life is but a tissue of habits.
HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL
Journal Intime
We are being constantly warned against bad habits--told how easy it is to break them, but, all summed up, this advice doesn't seem to be the right sort. We all know our bad habits, acknowledge them to ourselves, at least, and would gladly rid ourselves of them. But we don't do so and there is a good reason. Trying not to do something is so lacking in initiative, so nugatory a thing that most of us dismiss the idea almost without a second thought.
WILLIAM HENRY MCMASTERS
"On the Contracting of Habits", Originality and Other Essays
A habit is a formula our brain automatically follows: When I see CUE, I will do ROUTINE in order to get a REWARD.
CHARLES DUHIGG
The Power of Habit
We are masters of our actions from the beginning up to the very end. But, in the case of our habits, we are only masters of their commencement--each particular little increase being as imperceptible as in the case of bodily infirmities. But yet our habits are voluntary, in that it was once in our power to adopt or not to adopt such or such a course of conduct.
ARISTOTLE
Nicomachean Ethics
If a person has acquired an undesirable habit it is useless to try to press a reform upon him or her until the picture of the old habit has been wiped out and supplanted by a desirable one.
WALTER MATTHEWS
"Habit", Human Life from Many Angles
Ronan did not smoke; he preferred his habits with hangovers.
MAGGIE STIEFVATER
The Raven Boys
Bad habits: easy to develop and hard to live with. Good habits: hard to develop and easy to live with.
ORRIN WOODWARD
L.I.F.E.
Habits are either the best of servants or the worst of masters.
CROFT M. PENTZ
The Complete Book of Zingers
In time action becomes habit, and habit can wear reason away, leaving no traces.
BERNARD BECKETT
Genesis
Habits influence the character pretty much as undercurrents influence a vessel, and whether they speed us on the way of our wishes, or retard our progress, their influence is not the less important because imperceptible.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
Habit will reconcile us to everything but change.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
The truth is that everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits.
ALBERT CAMUS
The Plague
Sometimes I get the feeling that we're just a bunch of habits. The gestures we repeat over and over, they're just our need to be recognized. Without them, we'd be unidentifiable.
NICOLE KRAUSS
Man Walks Into a Room
Ill habits gather by unseen degrees --
As brooks make rivers, rivers run to seas.
JOHN DRYDEN
Ovid
Habit, like a fog, tends to palliate things and beings. Little by little it obscures the features of a face and rubs down deformities; if you live with a humpback day in and day out, after a time he loses his hump.
OCTAVE MIRBEAU
The Diary of a Chambermaid
Habit! that skilful but slow-moving arranger who begins by letting our minds suffer for weeks on end in temporary quarters, but whom our minds are none the less only too happy to discover at last, for without it, reduced to their own devices, they would be powerless to make any room seem habitable.
MARCEL PROUST
Swann's Way
A faithful horse had done service for many years in a bark mill. At length he became old and blind and stiff. Kindness then prompted that he be turned out to pasture the remainder of his days. But, to the astonishment of the owner, every day, when it was time to work, the horse would start on a tramp, going round in a circle, just as he had been accustomed to do for so many years. Passers-by would stop and look at the old horse as he went around, just as if he was working as in days gone by. The force of habit had fixed itself upon him.
HENRY F. KLETZING & ELMER L. KLETZING
"Habits", Traits of Character Illustrated in Bible Light
When you've been used to doing things, and they've been taken away from you, it's as if your hands had been cut off, and you felt the fingers as are of no use to you.
GEORGE ELIOT
Felix Holt
When habit clutches a man he becomes a limp mass of nerveless meat.
ABRAHAM MILLER
Unmoral Maxims