Quotes About Habits

It is easier to prevent bad habits than to break them.

In the first 30 years of your life, you make your habits. For the last 30 years of your life, your habits make you.

The way you think, the way you behave, the way you eat, can influence your life by 30 to 50 years.

They proved that if you quit smoking, it will prolong your life. What they haven't proved is that a prolonged life is a good thing. I haven't seen the stats on that yet.

I can't change your life till I can get you to change your daily routine.

Design your life to minimize reliance on willpower.

Passions weaken, but habits strengthen, with age, and it is the great task of youth to set the current of habit and to form the tastes which are most productive of happiness in life.

Our lives change when our habits change.

Loneliness does not worry me; life is difficult enough, putting up with yourself and with your own habits.

We should all rehearse and practise the positives in our life, rather than doing what so many people do.

I'm learning real skills that I can apply throughout the rest of my life...procrastinating and rationalizing.

Great battles are really won before they are actually fought. To control our passions we must govern our habits, and keep watch over ourselves in the small details of everyday life.

Who is strong? He that can conquer his bad habits.

A change in bad habits leads to a change in life.

We can develop the habit of thinking thoughts that are pure, true, and good. We can develop the habits of prayer and meditating on the Scriptures. But these habits will only be developed through frequent repetition.

It is vain to guard our minds and emotions against that which comes from without if we do not at the same time deal with habits of sin which are within. The battle for holiness must be fought on two fronts—without and within. Only then will we see progress toward holiness.

There is a vast difference between failing and becoming a failure. We become a failure when we give up—when we stop trying. But as long as we are working on those sinful habits, regardless of how often we fail, we have not become a failure, and we can expect to see progress.

This axiom of Aristotelian logic has so deeply imbued our habits of thought that it is felt to be "natural" and self-evident, while on the other hand the statement that X is A and not A seems to be nonsensical. (Of course, the statement refers to the subject X at a given time, not to X now and X later, or one aspect of X as against another aspect.)

It was a long time since I had been in a theatre. And I would not have come now had Pat not wanted it. Theatres, concerts, books—all these middle-class habits I had almost lost. It was not the time for them. Politics provided theatre enough—the shootings every night made another concert—and the gigantic book of poverty was more impressive than any library.

Strange habits the Americans have! To imagine a lawyer as a gentleman is a contradiction in terms, surely!

Our tendency is to try something a few times, and if it works, it gets reinforced, and we continue to do it; if it doesn't work, we abandon it. In psychology this is called the law of effects—we tend to keep doing things we are rewarded for doing. The opposite, however, is also true: we tend to avoid what punishes us or gives us pain.

It occurred to me that I had been extraordinarily fortunate to have grown up in a prosperous country in an era when, for pretty much the first time in its history, I could read whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted to. And what had I done with this freedom? I had slowly, though unintentionally, abused it. My reading life had become an accumulation of bad habits, short cuts and lies.

If the source were simply a few behavioral habits, you would have conquered them already.

Your heart didn't arrive at its present condition overnight. It won't become healthy overnight either. You can't overcome in an instant the effects of years of blockage caused by guilt, anger, greed, and jealousy. Adopting new habits of the heart is a process, but it's a process that will yield some immediate results.