Quotes About Habit

This is the true situation: nothing has power to tempt me or move me to wrong action that I have not given power by what I permit to be in me. And the most spiritually dangerous things in me are the little habits of thought, feeling, and action that I regard as "normal" because "everyone is like that" and it is "only human.

the intention points the way, and then habituated thought and desire must be redirected to support the intention in the moments of action.

Now just think of what the quality of life and character must be in a person who would routinely interrupt sacred rituals to pursue reconciliation with a fellow human being. What kind of thought life, what feeling tones and moods, what habits of body and mind, what kinds of deliberations and choices would you find in such a person? When you answer these questions, you will have a vision of the true "rightness beyond" that is at home in God's kingdom of power and love. Of

I guess, says Deagle, finally, I'll just have a pack of Marlboro Lights. That's what I used to smoke when I was human.

Apparently, using two spaces after a period has become anachronistic. But tell that to my right thumb. —

DB: You mean the Second Viennese School as refugees' music? EWS: Yes. Exiles' music—not only from the social world but also from the tonal world, if the tonal world by the time they inherit it is the accepted world, the world of habit and custom and a certain kind of solidity.

ignore the bad habit and put your energy toward building a new habit that will override the old one.

Make no mistake: E-mail, Facebook, and Twitter checking constitute a neural addiction.

I find television very educational. Every time someone turns it on, I go in the other room and read a book.

"It is very inconvenient habit of kittens (Alice had once made the remark) that, whatever you say to them they always purr."

When we are attentive to our actions we are not prisoners to our habits.

Everything you are used to, once done long enough, starts to seem natural, even though it might not be.

The Elizabethan age might be better named the beginning of the smoking era.

It is curious how tyrannical the habit of reading is, and what shifts we make to escape thinking. There is no bore we dread being left alone with so much as our own minds.

If you do not wish to be prone to anger, do not feed the habit; give it nothing which may tend to its increase.

As small letters hurt the sight, so do small matters him that is too much intent upon them; they vex and stir up anger, which begets an evil habit in him in reference to greater affairs.

We had our breakfasts—whatever happens in a house, robbery or murder, it doesn't matter, you must have your breakfast.

It is a habit of mine always to give up to Miss Halcombe. I find, by experience, that it saves noise.

Custom gives the same stability to the group that heredity and instinct give to the species, and habit to the individual. It is the routine that keeps men sane; for if there were no grooves along which thought and action might move with unconscious ease, the mind would be perpetually hesitant, and would soon take refuge in lunacy.

Excellence is an art won by training and habituation: we do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have these because we have acted rightly; "these virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions";50 we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit:

MAN is not willingly a political animal. The human male associates with his fellows less by desire than by habit, imitation, and the compulsion of circumstance; he does not love society so much as he fears solitude.

we do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have these because we have acted rightly; these virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions;[69] we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit; the good of man is a working of the soul in the way of excellence in a complete life;... for as it is not one swallow or one fine day that makes a spring, so it is not one day or a short time that makes a man blessed and happy.

It costs as much to support a vice as it does to support a family.

It is true that, if the affections or aptness of the children be extraordinary, then it is good not to cross it; but generally the precept" of the Pythagoreans "is good, Optimum lege suave et facile illud faciet consuetudo,"—choose the best; custom will make it pleasant and easy.35 For "custom is the principal magistrate of man's life."36