Quotes About Habit

The key of liberation is to acknowledge that your unhealthy response to other peoples' behavior is a habit – and most importantly – that it's a habit you can break.

You don't need special traits, special genes, or special motivation to write a lot. You don't need to want to write--people rarely feel like doing unpleasant tasks that lack deadlines--so don't wait until you feel like it. Productive writing comes from harnessing the power of habit, and habits come from repetition p.129

The key is the habit—the week-in, week-out regularity—not the number of days, the number of hours, or the time of day.

When confronted with their fruitless ways, binge writers often proffer a self-defeating dispositional attribution: "I'm just not the kind of person who's good at making a schedule and sticking to it." This is nonsense, of course. People like dispositional explanations when they don't want to change [...]

Serious writers write, inspired or not. Over time they discover that routine is a better friend to them than inspiration

He stopped going to meetings, and no longer follows his exercise program.

Do this every time the thought comes back. After a while, Fox insists, it will recur less and less often until you forget it completely.

It is a basic psychological teaching that if we want to change the way we feel, we must first change the way we act.

Ursula believes that it was her habit of reading these cuttings that gave her a head start with her education.

It is the return of a dog to his vomit.

Or that Isaac Porter bit his nails like a man playing a mouth organ?

The vague qualifiers in those examples are chaff, a habit of conversation—um, ah, ahem! They add nothing. Happy, for example, is a strong, clear word, but if it's not enough, overjoyed, thrilled, or ecstatic has a precision that "very happy" lacks.

People like what they know. It's human nature.

Jock's drinking didn't help matters. At four o'clock every afternoon when we were in Bombay, we met the rest of the family on the veranda for cocktails. There was a ritual to it,

After you have planned each detail of an activity, organized a tray of materials, and practiced with them, you can model a cycle of activity with the child. Do so very slowly and methodically, pausing briefly after each step. Your child wants to imitate you but his thinking skills are limited. He relies on habit, pattern and repetition.

I began drinking because the thought that I was drinking gave me a kind of identity: each time I poured myself a brandy in the deserted afternoon I could say to myself 'I am a woman who drinks.

You don't remember what you never fail to do, that is common knowledge,

There are 10,000 books in my library, and it will keep growing until I die. This has exasperated my daughters, amused my friends and baffled my accountant. If I had not picked up this habit in the library long ago, I would have more money in the bank today; I would not be richer.

Probably for the first time in my life I was beginning to comprehend that trust was a habit I would need to cultivate.

And by that habit of submission, with which we are only too familiar, the thought of the next generation retains this religious twist, which is at once servile and authoritative; for authority and servility walk ever hand in hand.

Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots? Neither are you able to do good—you who are accustomed to doing evil.