Quotes About Habit

As Aristotle said: "We are what we repeatedly do." Or as the Dalai Lama put it more recently: "There isn't anything that isn't made easier through constant familiarity and training. Through training we can change; we can transform ourselves.

A growing body of research suggests that as little as 5 percent of our behaviors are consciously self-directed. We are creatures of habit and as much as 95 percent of what we do occurs automatically or in reaction to a demand or an anxiety.

Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going.

One discipline always leads to another discipline.

The more you read, the better you get, the more better you get, the more you like it; and the more you like it, the more you do it.

The more you read, the better you get at it; the better you get at it, the more you like it; and the more you like it, the more you do it.

I have a lifelong habit for dealing with dejection: I leave town. I first ran away from home at three. Mother helped pack my bag.

The more deeply the path is etched, the more it is used, and the more it is used, the more deeply it etched.

It is what we do routinely, not what we do rarely, that delineates the character of a person.

Habit has two parts, Toni [Packer] says. There is the habit itself (finger biting, smoking, drinking, whatever), and there is the observer who wants to stop, who is also a habit. And there is the conflict, the battle between the desire to indulge, which is an escape from what is, and the desire to stop, which is also a movement away from what is.

He often expressed his amazement...at the power of theatre to transfigure a play, and inject it with significances he could never have imagined without it: yet for all that, he did not change custom or become a theatregoer, and this...was a part of the price he had to pay for a habit of Protestantism.

Tiger Lily made an attempt at a smile. After having felt the need to glower at other children for most of her life, smiles never came easily to her face. But this one was half all right. "I miss you already," he said. Tiger Lily wanted to say it back. But she held on to the words greedily, too caught in the habit of keeping herself a secret. And Peter-half sadly, half-expectantly-let her go.

Rain and I have routines. We like routines.

When frazzled, people tend to revert to the familiar and the well rehearsed.

I'm a writer," Jane says. "I have a habit, I guess, where I see all the possibilities in a situation. No matter what, there's always at least one that's terrifying.

They were dismantling their habits and routines, and it was like pulling up floorboards and finding joy underneath.

He didn't wait for her to finish. He never did. A habit unacceptable in a husband.

Leopards don't change their spots

Plant a thought, harvest an act," they sang. "Plant an act, harvest a habit; plant a habit, harvest a character; plant a character, harvest a destiny.

nature, and they had to accept nature in all its amplitude; these troubles were the age-old habit of respecting nature's orders, accepting from it the enlightenment as well as the horror.

Because they have been designed to keep you online, the algorithms also favor emotions, especially anger and fear. And because the sites are addictive, they affect people in ways they don't expect. Anger becomes a habit. Divisiveness becomes normal.

You can get used to eating breakfast with a man in a fedora. You can get used to anything, my mother was in the habit of saying.

Depression is one of the unknown modes of being. There are no words for a world without a self, seen with impersonal clarity. All language can register is the slow return to oblivion we call health when imagination automatically recolors the landscape and habit blurs perception and language takes up its routine flourishes.

It is hard for fish to be aware of water. It is hard for us to notice something that's an ingrained pattern shaping our habitual thought.