A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial
appearance of being right.
-Thomas Paine
A lot of fancier yarns come from people trying to tell the truth. It's
not easy once you're out of the habit.
-Dashiell Hammett
A nail is driven out by another nail. Habit is overcome by habit.
-Desiderius
Erasmus
A poet who reads his verse in public may have other nasty habits.
-Robert
A. Heinlein
Almost always tradition is nothing but a record and a machine-made
imitation of the habits that our ancestors created. The average
conservative is a slave to the most incidental and trivial part of his
forefathers' glory- to the archaic formula which happened to express
their genius or the eighteenth-century contrivance by which for a time
it was served.
-Walter Lippmann
Bad books engender bad habits, but bad habits engender good books.
-René
Descartes
Behavioral psychology is the science of pulling habits out of rats.
-Dr.
Douglas Busch
Beware of your habits. The better they are the more surely they will be
your undoing.
-Holbrook Jackson
Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.
-Henry Adams
Character is long-standing habit.
-Plutarch
Cocaine isn't habit forming. I should know- I've been using it for years.
-Tallulah
Bankead
Consciousness is a phase of mental life which arises in connection with
the formation of new habits. When habit is formed, consciousness only
interferes to spoil our performance.
-William R. Inge
Creativity is the defeat of habit by originality.
-Arthur Koestler
Crime is terribly revealing. Try and vary your methods as you will, your
tastes, your habits, your attitude of mind, and your soul is revealed by
your actions.
-Agatha Christie
Curious things, habits. People themselves never knew they had them.
-Agatha
Christie
Did it ever occur to you that everybody is more or less afraid of nearly
everything, and that courage isn't a damn thing but a habit of not
dodging things because you're afraid of them?
-Dashiell Hammett
Even happiness itself may become habitual. There is a habit of looking
at the bright side of things, and also of looking at the dark side.
-Samuel
Smiles
Everything in life is miraculous. It rests within the power of each of
us to awaken from a dragging nightmare of life made up of unimportant
tasks and tedious useless little habits to see life as it really is, and
to rejoice in its exquisite wonderfulness.
-James Branch Cabell
Excellence... is not an act but a habit.
-Will Durant
Expelled from individual consciousness by the rush of change, history
finds its revenge by stamping the collective unconsciousness with habits
and values.
-Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
Feeling sorry for yourself and your present condition is not only a
waste of energy but the worst habit you could possibly have.
-Dale
Carnegie
For legislators make the citizens good by forming habits in them, and
this is the wish of every legislator, and those who do not effect it
miss their mark, and it is in this that a good constitution differs from
a bad one.
-Aristotle
Habit is a great deadener.
-Samuel Beckett
Habit is stronger than reason.
-George Santayana
Habit is the intersection of knowledge (what to do), skill (how to do),
and desire (want to do).
-Stephen Covey
Habit, n. A shackle for the free.
-Ambrose Bierce
Habits and customs are a convenience devised for the support of timid
natures who dare not allow their souls free play.
-Virginia Woolf
Habits gradually change the face of one`s life as time changes one`s
physical face; and one does not know it.
-Virginia Woolf
Habits of thought persist through the centuries; and while a healthy
brain may reject the doctrine it no longer believes, it will continue to
feel the same sentiments formerly associated with that doctrine.
-Charlotte
Perkins Gilman
Habits wear more constantly and with greater force than reason, which,
when we have most need of it, is seldom fairly consulted, and more
rarely obeyed.
-John Locke
I am in the habit of looking not so much to the nature of a gift as to
the spirit in which it is offered.
-Robert Louis Stevenson
I am not a politician, and my other habits are good, also.
-Artemus
Ward
I believe that you can reach the point where there is no longer any
difference between developing the habit of pretending to believe and
developing the habit of believing.
-Umberto Eco
I don't think for a moment that Americans are inherently more stupid or
brain-dead than anyone else. It's just that they are routinely provided
with conditions that spare them the need to think, so they have got out
of the habit.
-Bill Bryson
I made no resolutions for the New Year. The habit of making plans, of
criticizing, sanctioning and molding my life, is too much of a daily
event for me.
-Anaïs Nin
I was talking aloud to myself. A habit of the old: they choose the
wisest person present to speak to.
-J.R.R. Tolkien
If you are going to achieve excellence in big things, you develop the
habit in little matters. Excellence is not an exception, it is a
prevailing attitude.
-Colin Powell
It is an ironic habit of human beings to run faster when we have lost
our way.
-Rollo May
It is not from nature, but from education and habits, that our wants are
chiefly derived.
-Henry Fielding
It is our American habit, if we find the foundations of our educational
structure unsatisfactory, to add another story or a wing.
-John
Dewey
It was mortifying to find how strong the habit of idle speech may become
in one's self. One need not always be saying something in this noisy
world.
-Sarah Orne Jewett
Laws are never as effective as habits.
-Adlai E. Stevenson II
Laziness is nothing more than the habit of resting before you get tired.
-Jules
Renard
Life has got a habit of not standing hitched. You got to ride it like
you find it. You got to change with it. If a day goes by that don't
change some of your old notions for new ones, that is just about like
trying to milk a dead cow.
-Woody Guthrie
Love and joy are incredibly habit-forming; often a single exposure is
enough to cause permanent addiction.
-John Brunner
Love is an act of endless forgiveness, a tender look which becomes a
habit.
-Peter Ustinov
Man has an incurable habit of not fulfilling the prophecies of his
fellow men.
-Alistair Cooke
Man is not imprisoned by habit. Great changes in him can be wrought by
crisis- once that crisis can be recognized and understood.
-Norman
Cousins
Marriage is a triumph of habit over hate.
-Oscar Levant
Marriage is a very good thing, but I think it's a mistake to make a
habit out of it.
-W. Somerset Maugham
Movies are one of the bad habits that have corrupted our century. They
have slipped into the American mind more misinformation in one evening
than the Dark Ages could muster in a decade.
-Ben Hecht
My problem lies in reconciling my gross habits with my net income.
-Errol
Flynn
Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are
useless. There is no intelligence where there is no need of change.
-H.G.
Wells
Never give way to melancholy; resist it steadily, for the habit will
encroach.
-Sydney Smith
No man can be friendly to another whose personal habits differ
materially from his own. Even the trivialities of table manners thus
become important. The fact probably explains much of race prejudice, and
even more of national prejudice.
-H.L. Mencken
Nothing is stronger than habit.
-Ovid
Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits.
-Mark Twain
Now the world in general doesn't know what to make of originality; it is
startled out of its comfortable habits of thought, and its first
reaction is one of anger.
-W. Somerset Maugham
Of all the forces in the universe, the hardest to overcome is the force
of habit. Gravity is easy-peasy by comparison.
-Terry Pratchett
Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing
exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the
well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed.
-Herman Melville
One can't get over the habit of being a little girl all at once.
-Lucy
Maud Montgomery
One gets a bad habit of being unhappy.
-George Eliot
One has to grow up with good talk in order to form the habit of it.
-Helen
Hayes
One will rarely err if extreme actions be ascribed to vanity, ordinary
actions to habit, and mean actions to fear.
-Friedrich Wilhelm
Nietzsche
Our words reveal our thoughts; our manners mirror our self-esteem; our
actions reflect our character; our habits predict the future.
-William
Arthur Ward
People get so in the habit of worry that if you save them from drowning
and put them on a bank to dry in the sun with hot chocolate and muffins
they wonder whether they are catching cold.
-John Jay Chapman
People who develop the habit of thinking of themselves as world citizens
are fulfilling the first requirement of sanity in our time.
-Norman
Cousins
People who say they are going to drop him/her/it 'like a bad habit' have
obviously never had a bad habit.
-Bruce Thompson
People's sex habits are as well known in Hollywood as their political
opinions, and much less criticized.
-Ben Hecht
Power is sweet; it is a drug, the desire for which increases with a
habit.
-Bertrand Russell
Public opinion is a permeating influence, and it exacts obedience to
itself; it requires us to drink other men's thoughts, to speak other
men's words, to follow other men's habits.
-Walter Bagehot
Pursuits become habits.
-Ovid
Relearn astonishment, stop grasping for knowledge, lose the habit of the
past.
-Elias Cannetti
Television has spread the habit of instant reaction and stimulated the
hope of instant results.
-Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
Television is like the invention of indoor plumbing. It didn't change
people's habits. It just kept them inside the house.
-Alfred
Hitchcock
The chains of habit are generally too small to be felt until they are
too strong to be broken.
-Samuel Johnson
The habit of common and continuous speech is a symptom of mental
deficiency.
-Walter Bagehot
The habits of a vigorous mind are born in contending with difficulties.
-Abigail
Adams
The most expensive habit in the world is celluloid, not heroin, and I
need a fix every few years.
-Steven Spielberg
The regularity of a habit is generally in proportion to its absurdity.
-Marcel
Proust
The second half of a man's life is made up of nothing but the habits he
has acquired during the first half.
-Fyodor Dostoevsky
The time at our disposal each day is elastic; the passions we feel
dilate it, those that inspire us shrink it, and habit fills it.
-Marcel
Proust
The wise man does no wrong in changing his habits with the times.
-Dionysius
Cato
The wise say that our failure is to form habits: for habit is the mark
of a stereotyped world.
-A.C. Grayling
There are a host of bad habits and inconsiderate acts which mean nothing
in themselves but which are terrible as indicators of the true
composition of a soul.
-Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
There is not a more perilous or immoral habit of mind than the
sanctifying of success.
-John Dalberg-Acton
There is nothing quite as habit-forming as money.
-Don Marquis
This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit
it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing Government, they can
exercise their constitutional right of amending it or their
revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.
-Abraham Lincoln
Thus every action must be due to one or other of seven causes: chance,
nature, compulsion, habit, reasoning, anger, or appetite.
-Aristotle
Truth is a habit of integrity, not a strategy of politics.
-George
McGovern
Very little of the great cruelty shown by men can really be attributed
to cruel instinct. Most of it comes from thoughtlessness or inherited
habit.
-Albert Schweitzer
We are quite ignorant of the real power of our habits until we try to
give them up.
-C.S. Lewis
We have built into the constitution of the human race the habit and
desire of taking, as divorced from its natural precursor and concomitant
of making.
-Charlotte Perkins Gilman
While I gave up God a long time ago, I never shook the habit of wanting
to believe in something. So I replaced my creed of everlasting life with
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
-Sarah Vowell
You must possess, at the same time, the habit of communicating and the
habit of listening. The union is rather rare, but irresistible.
-Benjamin
Disraeli
You'll break the worry habit the day you decide you can meet and master
the worst that can happen to you.
-Arnold H. Glasow
Categories: Habits
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