Quotes about habit

Habits are formed by the repetition of particular acts. They are strengthened by an increase in the number of repeated acts. Habits are also weakened or broken, and contrary habits are formed by the repetition of contrary acts.

— Mortimer J. Adler

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.

— Aristotle

It is well to be up before daybreak, for such habits contribute to health, wealth, and wisdom.

— Aristotle

Habit is ten times nature.

— Duke of Wellington Arthur Wellesley

Habit, if not resisted, soon becomes necessity.

— St. Augustine

A single bad habit will mar an otherwise faultless character, as an ink-drop soileth the pure white page.

— Hosea Ballou

The power of habit and the charm of novelty are the two adverse forces which explain the follies of mankind.

— Maria De Beausacq

Habit is a great deadener.

— Samuel Beckett

Habit is a shackle for the free.

— Ambrose Bierce

Never permit failure to become a habit.

— William Frederick Book

Habits are to the soul what the veins and arteries are to the blood, the courses in which it moves.

— Horace Bushnell

Feeling sorry for yourself, and your present condition, is not only a waste of energy but the worst habit you could possibly have.

— Dale Carnegie

Certes, they been lye to hounds, for an hound when he cometh by the roses, or by other bushes, though he may nat pisse, yet wole he heve up his leg and make a countenance to pisse.

— Geoffrey Chaucer

Curious things, habits. People themselves never knew they had them.

— Agatha Christie

Great is the power of habit. It teaches us to bear fatigue and to despise wounds and pain.

— Marcus T. Cicero

To exist is a habit I do not despair of acquiring.

— E. M. Cioran

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

— Jo Coudert

Make good habits and they will make you.

— Parks Cousins

Habit with him was all the test of truth, it must be right: I've done it from my youth.

— George Crabbe

It seems, in fact, as though the second half of a man's life is made up of nothing, but the habits he has accumulated during the first half.

— Fyodor Dostoevsky

We first make our habits, and then our habits make us.

— John Dryden

Ill habits gather unseen degrees, as brooks make rivers, rivers run to seas.

— John Dryden

Any act often repeated soon forms a habit; and habit allowed, steady gains in strength, At first it may be but as a spider's web, easily broken through, but if not resisted it soon binds us with chains of steel.

— Tryon Edwards

Habit is either the best of servants or the worst of masters.

— Nathaniel Emmons

The easier it is to do, the harder it is to change.

— Eng's Principle

A nail is driven out by another nail. Habit is overcome by habit.

— Desiderius Erasmus

Habit, my friend, is practice long pursued, that at last becomes man himself.

— Evenus

My problem lies in reconciling my gross habits with my net income.

— Errol Flynn

Each year one vicious habit discarded, in time might make the worst of us good.

— Benjamin Franklin

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

— Benjamin Franklin

Your net worth to the world is usually determined by what remains after your bad habits are subtracted from your good ones.

— Benjamin Franklin

The individual who wants to reach the top in business must appreciate the might of the force of habit and must understand that practices are what create habits. He must be quick to break those habits that can break him and hasten to adopt those practices that will become the habits that help him achieve the success he desires.

— J. Paul Getty

First we form habits, then they form us. Conquer your bad habits, or they'll eventually conquer you.

— Dr. Rob Gilbert

There is an invisible garment woven around us from our earliest years; it is made of the way we eat, the way we walk, the way we greet people...

— Jean Giraudoux

Achieve success in any area of life by identifying the optimum strategies and repeating them until they become habits.

— Charles J. Givens

The phrases that men hear or repeat continually, end by becoming convictions and ossify the organs of intelligence.

— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

The greatest people will be those who possess the best capacities, cultivated with the best habits.

— James Harris

Wise living consists perhaps less in acquiring good habits than in acquiring as few habits as possible.

— Eric Hoffer

Cultivate only the habits that you are willing should master you.

— Elbert Hubbard

Habit is a form of exercise

— Elbert Hubbard

Every once in a while someone without a single bad habit gets caught.

— Kin Hubbard

Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor.

— William James

We must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can...in the acquisition of a new habit, we must take car to launch ourselves with as strong and decided initiative as possible. Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life.

— William James

The habit of looking on the best side of every event is worth more than a thousand pounds a years.

— Samuel Johnson

The chains of habit are generally too week to be felt, until they are too strong to be broken.

— Samuel Johnson

Habit with its iron sinews, clasps us and leads us day by day.

— Alphonse De Lamartine

One might call habit a moral friction: something that prevents the mind from gliding over things but connects it with them and makes it hard for it to free itself from them.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

Practice conquers the habit of doing, without reflecting on the rule.

— John Locke

Once you learn to quit, it becomes a habit.

— Vince Lombardi

To change a habit, make a conscious decision, then act out the new behavior.

— Maxwell Maltz

Habit is a cable; we weave a thread of it each day, and at last we cannot break it.

— Horace Mann

If an idiot were to tell you the same story every day for a year, you would end by believing it.

— Horace Mann

The beginning of a habit is like an invisible thread, but every time we repeat the act we strengthen the strand, add to it another filament, until it becomes a great cable and binds us irrevocably thought and act.

— Orison Swett Marden

Man becomes a slave to his constantly repeated acts. What he at first chooses, at last compels.

— Orison Swett Marden

Stop the habit of wishful thinking and start the habit of thoughtful wishes.

— Mary Martin

The unfortunate thing about this world is that the good habits are much easier to give up than the bad ones.

— W. Somerset Maugham

Good habits are as easy to form as bad ones.

— Tim Mccarver

Habit is second nature.

— Michel Eyquem De Montaigne

Habits change into character.

— Ovid

Habit is the second nature which destroys the first.

— Blaise Pascal

Habit is a second nature that destroys the first. But what is nature? Why is habit not natural? I am very much afraid that nature itself is only a first habit, just as habit is a second nature.

— Blaise Pascal

The regularity of a habit is generally in proportion to its absurdity.

— Marcel Proust

Good habits result from resisting temptation.

— Proverb

Habits are cobwebs at first; cables at last.

— Chinese Proverb

Incredibly, many people continue their old life-style, their habits even if they feel miserable, lonely, bored, inadequate, or abused. Why? Of course... because habit is an easy place to hide.

— Tom Rusk

Habit is stronger than reason.

— George Santayana

You were not born with the habit of brushing your teeth. With persistent action, over a period of time, you developed the habit. Now, I'll bet you would never consider going a week without brushing.

— Paul R. Scheele

How use doth breed a habit in man!

— William Shakespeare

In early childhood you may lay the foundation of poverty or riches, industry of idleness, good or evil, by the habits to which you train your children. Teach them right habits then, and their future life is safe.

— Lydia Sigourney

Good habits, which bring our lower passions and appetites under automatic control, leave our natures free to explore the larger experiences of life. Too many of us divide and dissipate our energies in debating actions which should be taken for granted.

— Ralph W. Sockman

Laws are never as effective as habits.

— Adlai E. Stevenson

Habits are the daughters of action, but then they nurse their mother, and produce daughters after her image, but far more beautiful and prosperous.

— Jeremy Taylor

Successful people are simply those with success habits.

— Brian Tracy

Our repeated failure to fully act as we would wish must not discourage us. It is the sincere intention that is the essential thing, and this will in time release us from the bondage of habits which at present seem almost insuperable.

— Thomas Troward

A habit cannot be tossed out the window; it must be coaxed down the stairs a step at a time.

— Mark Twain

Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time.

— Mark Twain

To stop smoking is the easiest thing I ever did. I ought to know; I've done it a thousand times.

— Mark Twain

To fall into a habit is to begin to cease to be.

— Miguel De Unamuno

Break a bad habit -- drop it

— Source Unknown

Good habits are formed; bad habits we fall into.

— Source Unknown

Practice in time becomes second nature.

— Source Unknown

Man is occasionally what he should be perpetually.

— Source Unknown

There is an old saying that, you can't kill a frog by dropping him into hot water. As you drop him into the hot water, he reacts so quickly that he immediately jumps out unharmed. But if you put him in cold water and gradually warm it up until it is scalding hot, you have him cooked before he knows it. The encroachment of bad habits in our lives is very much like this.

— Source Unknown

There is no pleasure in life equal to that of the conquest of a vicious habit.

— Source Unknown

It's just as easy to form the habit of succeeding as it is to succumb to the habit of failure. Habits aren't instincts; they're acquired reactions. They don't just happen; they are caused. Once you determine the original cause of a habit, it is within your power either to accept or reject it.

— Source Unknown

Trivial things do matter... more people are killed each year by the bite of mosquitoes than are stepped upon by charging elephants.

— Source Unknown

As a twig is bent the tree inclines.

— Virgil

A man who gives his children habits of industry provides for them better than by giving them a fortune.

— Richard Whately

In every age of well-marked transition, there is the pattern of habitual dumb practice and emotion which is passing and there is oncoming a new complex of habit.

— Alfred North Whitehead

Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.

— Virginia Woolf

Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.

— Anthelme Brillat-Savarin