Quotes About Habit

Habit and routine have an unbelievable power to waste and destroy

In the conduct of life, habits count for more than maxims, because habit is a living maxim, becomes flesh and instinct. To reform one's maxims is nothing: it is but to change the title of the book. To learn new habits is everything, for it is to reach the substance of life. Life is but a tissue of habits.

Most men are prisoners at best, who some strong habit every drag about like chain and ball.

Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.

The habit of expression leads to the search for something to express. Something remains as a residuum of the commonplace itself, if one strikes out every commonplace in the expression.

And so it must be in every man while his moral habits are not purified; and, though there may be many shades, some of a more and some a less pronounced and settled character, yet there are, after all, only two main classes. A man must either deny or indulge himself. There is no middle or indifferent state—for the not denying is indulgence; it is throwing the reins on the neck of his lusts, though he may lack boldness to set the spur;

Routine is a ground to stand on, a wall to retreat to; we cannot draw on our boots without bracing ourselves against it.

By avarice and selfishness, and a groveling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows Nature but as a robber.

The Indian… stands free and unconstrained in Nature, is her inhabitant and not her guest, and wears her easily and gracefully. But the civilized man has the habits of the house. His house is a prison.

Whisky was almost universally used.

A kleptomaniac is a person who helps himself because he can't help himself.

It's hard to change adults. They are going to do what they are going to do.

As long as habit and routine dictate the pattern of living, new dimensions of the soul will not emerge.

most men do not try] to recognize the truth, but to persuade themselves that the life they are leading, which is what they like and are used to, is a life perfectly consistent with truth.

A cigar is a sort of thing, not exactly a pleasure, but the crown and outward sign of pleasure.

And so liberalism had become a habit of Stepan Arkadyevitch's, and he liked his newspaper, as he did his cigar after dinner, for the slight fog it diffused in his brain.

And so the liberal tendency became a habit with Stepan Arkadyich, and he liked his newspaper, as he liked a cigar after dinner, for the slight haze it produced in his head.

when he was officiating in a depressed state of mind he felt that the influence produced on him by the service would endure. And it did in fact weaken till only the habit remained.

It's a depressing habit you have of loving to sneeze and of eating apples as if they were juicier for you and being the first one to exclaim how good the movie is. You depress people. We like apples too.

You don't teach virtue by preaching virtue. You teach virtue by requiring virtuous behavior, so that virtuous behavior becomes a habit.

In religious matters she was no fanatic except when her sons and their birthright were concerned. The Catholic Mass suited her, a lifelong habit that she found comforting, almost as though it were another talisman to ward off evil.

Every morning he woke up it seemed impossible that he could ever consume another drop of alcohol, but that conviction had always evaporated by 5 o'clock in the afternoon.

Every morning when he woke up it seemed impossible that he could ever consume another drop of alcohol, but that conviction had always evaporated by five o'clock in the afternoon.

The desire for bad art is the desire bred of habit: like the smoker's desire for tobacco, more marked by the extreme malaise of denial than by any very strong delight in fruition.