Habit Quotes

The problem with living so long is that we get used to it. We watch the mortals age and wither and die around us, watch the world change and decay...but no matter the hardship or the pain or the sorrow we suffer, we choose to continue living. Out of sheer habit, I think.

~ Derek Landy

People assume that repetition is always a static thing, but I beg to differ. Repetition is just as often the complete opposite of that: or a sign of rapid personal growth. In this repetition manifests one's ability to go on experiencing again the very same thing from a different perspective and in a brand-new light.

~ Criss Jami

Motivation may be what starts you off, but it's habit that keeps you going back for more. Are your habits working for you or against you? Are your habits helping you to achieve your goals or hindering the process?

~ Miya Yamanouchi

Cultivate the habit of setting clearly-defined written goals, they are the road maps that guide you to your destination.

~ Roy Bennett

Failure is good as long as it doesn’t become a habit.

~ Michael Eisner

Building alibis is a deeply rooted habit.

~ Napoleon Hill

The habit of giving up when the present task is half finished and try something else is one of the chief causes of failure.

~ Christian D. Larson

Every negative complex of emotion conceals a conflict, a problem or dilemma made up of contradictory or opposing motives or desires. Self-observation must recover these emotional seeds of the dramatization of life if real control of habits is to occur. Otherwise, mere control of habits will itself become a form of dramatized conflict or warfare with the motives of our lives. Food desires, sex desires, relational desires, desires for experience and acquisition, for rest, for release, for attention, for solitude, for life, for death, the whole pattern of desires must come under the view of consciousness, the aspects of the conflicts must be differentiated, and habits must be controlled to serve well-being or the pleasurable and effective play of Life.This whole process is truly possible only in the midst of the prolonged occasion of spiritual life in practice, since the mere mechanical and analytical attempts at self-liberation and self-healing do not undermine the principal emotion or seat of conflict, which is the intention to identify with a separate self sense and to reject and forget the prior and natural Condition of Unqualified or Divine Consciousness.

~ Adi Da Samraj

Writers perform the so-called counterfactual thinking all the time. All the time. For most people, counterfactual thingking is a habit, but for writers, it is a necessity

~ Ika Natassa

Cussing like a commoner wasn't something I was tested on. I picked that habit up outside of high school.

~ S.a. Tawks

I am deep in my willed habits. From the outside, I suppose I look like an unoccupied house with one unconvincing night-light left on. Any burglar could look through my curtains and conclude I am empty. But he would be mistaken. Under that one light unstirred by movement or shadows there is a man at work, and as long as I am at work I am not a candidate for Menlo Park, or that terminal facility they cynically call a convalescent hospital, or a pine box. My habits and the unchanging season sustain me. Evil is what questions and disrupts.

~ Wallace Stegner

When we make a habit of acting on the interests arising out of our authentic passions, our enthusiasm can open doors before we even realize the potential that lies beyond them.

~ Marian Deegan

It is well said, then, that it is by doing just acts that the just man is produced, and by doing temperate acts the temperate man; without doing these no one would have even a prospect of becoming good.

~ Aristotle

Once you start settling, and letting others control your life, it can quickly become a habit, so it’s best to avoid such things altogether.

~ A.j. Darkholme

We are creatures of habit more than we are creatures of change.

~ A.j. Darkholme

Laws are always unstable unless they are founded upon the manners of the nation, manners are the only durable and resisting power in a people.

~ Alexis De Tocqueville

There is a natural prejudice which prompts men to despise whomsoever has been their inferior long after he has become their equal.

~ Alexis De Tocqueville

Shaving was invented to kill time before a date.

~ M*A*S*H Episode Guide Team

Good form without knowing it is the best form of all.

~ J.m. Barrie

One-year enlistment had proven problematic since the troops were scheduled to rotate out of the army just when they had begun to internalize the discipline of military service and became reliable soldiers.

~ Joseph J. Ellis

In truth, the crossing from nature to culture and vice versa has always stood wide open. It leads across an easily accessible bridge: the practising life. People have committed themselves to its construction since they came into existence - or rather, people only came into existence by applying themselves to the building of said bridge. The human being is the pontifical creature that, from its earliest evolutionary stages, has created tradition-compatible connections between the bridgeheads in the bodily realm and those in cultural programes. From the start, nature and culture are linked by a broad middle ground of embodied practices - containing languages, rituals and technical skills, in so far as these factors constitute the universal forms of automatized artificialities. This intermediate zone forms a morphologically rich, variable and stable region that can, for the time being, be referred to sufficiently clearly with such conventional categories as education, etiquette, custom, habit formation, training and exercise - without needing to wait for the purveyors of the 'human sciences', who, with all their bluster about culture, create the confusion for whose resolution they subsequently offer their services.

~ Peter Sloterdijk

Those who pretend as if they don't love you, are the ones who would hate to see you love another person.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

The habit of thinking prevents us at times from experiencing reality, immunises us against it, makes it seem no more than any other thought.

~ Marcel Proust

You can do the right thing that seems wrong to others, or the wrong thing that seems right, and its actually puerile to await recommendation when what you are about to do doesn't concerns anyone.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

We stay the same as we've always been, keeping to the path we've walked our whole lives. Paths that carry so much importance and perceived stability that we are utterly convinced it is the only one to walk – that anyone not walking it with us is being misled.

~ A.j. Darkholme

You are a reader, and therefore a thinker, an observer, a living soul who wants more out of this human experience.

~ Salil Jha

A virtue is a habit that includes all of these things: actions (you take care of your child even when you don't feel like it), emotions (you are often overtaken by feelings of tenderness and delight), perceptions (you understand your little children better than they understand themselves), choices (you choose to get out of bed and go to the children's room even when you'd much rather not), and thoughts (you think differently, more thoroughly and carefully, about your children than about anyone else in the world). The habit of love includes all these things, but not necessarily all at the same time.

~ Phillip Cary

The author says his young son, adopted from South Korea, occasionally burps and says thank you but otherwise is doing all right.

~ Jim Bouton

At the beginning of a pestilence and when it ends, there's always a propensity for rhetoric. In the first case, habits have not yet been lost; in the second, they're returning. It is in the thick of a calamity that one gets hardened to the truth - in other words, to silence.

~ Albert Camus

Be comfortable with being uncomfortable with negative habits.

~ Hafiz

Some people love to mentally bully others into feeling inferior. Sadly, they often succeed in doing so because a lot of people aren't in the habit of defining their true self-worth.

~ Hafiz

Never let those who are very accustomed to playing small, talk you out of the habit of dreaming big.

~ Hafiz

Success is always the final outcome when one adopts the habit of embracing each day with a high level of enthusiasm and productivity.

~ Hafiz

The true beauty of life can only be seen by the eye of habitual positive interpretations of one's experiences.

~ Hafiz

Little choices determine habit,Habit carves and molds characterWhich makes the big decisions.

~ Elizabeth George

People only keep their eyes open out of habit. And, nothing more.

~ S.d. Lawendowski

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

Motivation may be what starts you off, but it's habit that keeps you going back for more.

~ Miya Yamanouchi

He that becomes protector of sin shall surely become its prisoner.

~ Augustine Of Hippo

When I was a young man and very well thought of,I couldn't ask aught that the ladies denied.I nibbled their hearts like a handful of raisins,And I never spoke love but I knew that I lied. But I said to myself, 'Ah, they none of them know The secret I shelter and savor and save I wait for the one who will see through my seeming, And I'll know when I love by the way I behave.'The years drifted over like clouds in the heavens;The ladies went by me like snow on the wind.I charmed and I cheated, deceived and dissembled,And I sinned, and I sinned, and I sinned, and I sinned. But I said to myself, 'Ah, they none of them see There's part of me pure as the whisk of a wave. My lady is late but she'll find I've been faithful, And I'll know when I love by the way I behave.'At last came a lady both knowing and tender,Saying, 'you're not at all what they take you to be.'I betrayed her before she had quite finished speaking,And she swallowed cold poison and jumped in the sea. And I say to myself when there's time for a word, As I gracefully grow more debauched and depraved, 'Ah, love may be strong, but a habit is stronger And I knew when I loved by the way I behaved.

~ Peter S. Beagle