Habit Quotes

“Your sense of paralysis will be intensified if your family and friends are in the habit of pushing and cajoling you. Their nagging should statements reinforce the insulting thoughts already echoing through your head. Why is their pushy approach doomed to failure? It's a basic law of physics that for every action there's an equal and opposite reaction. Any time you feel shoved, whether by someone's hand actually on your chest or by someone trying to boss you around, you will naturally tighten up and resist so as to maintain your equilibrium and balance. You will attempt to exert your self-control and preserve your dignity by refusing to do the thing that you are being pushed to do. The paradox is that you often end up hurting yourself.”

— David D. Burns

“Don't allow yourself to get into the habit of dressing carelessly when there is 'only' your husband to see you. Depend upon it he has no use for faded tea-gowns and badly dressed hair, and he abhors the sight of curling pins as much as other men do. He is a man after all, and if his wife does not take the trouble to charm him, there are plenty of other women who will.”

— Blanche Ebbutt

“Love' was a word I had cheapened with overuse over the years, bleeding it dry of meaning by saying it purely from force of habit, or to convince myself of something of which I was far from sure. I wanted to wait until the words started to feel meaningful again before I used them.”

— Catherine Sanderson

“Love is an act of endless forgiveness; a tender look which becomes a habit.”

— Peter Ustinov

“For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately.”

— Virginia Woolf

“At what point does character-playing become habit, something for which we are grateful because it allows us to go through the world with the ease that comes from being predictable to ourselves, even if that predictability takes the form of neurosis, hysteria, depression? And at what point does that habit turn darkly into addiction? I wiped my hands clean. We are so desperate to be explicable to ourselves, to rely on ourselves, that we need to believe a certain version of who we are even when evidence starts to mount that the version is a lie, even when the part of us which is not tamed by habit strains to break free and overwhelm the tired, repetitive creature that our character has become, mouldering at the edges.”

— Kamila Shamsie

“If we would rise into that region of light and power plainly beckoning us through the Scriptures of truth we must break the evil habit of ignoring the spiritual. We must shift our interest from the seen to the unseen. For the great unseen Reality is God. "He that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him." This is basic in the life of faith. From there we can rise to unlimited heights. "Ye believe in God," said our Lord Jesus Christ, "believe also in me." Without the first there can be no second.”

— A.W. Tozer

“There is no general doctrine which is not capable of eating out our morality if unchecked by the deep-seated habit of direct fellow-feeling with individual fellow-men.”

— George Eliot

“You've been making a regular habit of flinging yourself in front of bullets," she remarked amiably. "It's really not a good custom. Curb this tendency to self-immolation.”

— Kerry Greenwood

“There was nothing now but this empty treadmill of what Clifford called the integrated life, the long living together of two people, who are in the habit of being in the same house with one another.
Nothingness! To accept the great nothingness of life seemed to be the one end of living. All the many busy and important little things that make up the grand sum-total of nothingness!”

— D.H. Lawrence

“To begin with, we must protest against a habit of quoting and paraphrasing at the same time. When a man is discussing what Jesus meant, let him state first of all what He said, not what the man thinks He would have said if he had expressed Himself more clearly.”

— G.K. Chesterton

“I wanted to know people. I wanted to love. But I didn't realize how badly I had been hurt. I didn't realize that my habit of distance had become so unconscious and deep that I didn't know how to be with another person. I could only fix that person in my imagination and turn him this way and that, trying to feel him, until my mind was tired and raw.”

— Mary Gaitskill

“As this is the first time I have had the floor, it may be well for me now to confess, that I am in the habit of freely imputing errors to my fellow-men.”

— Gerrit Smith

“It had started to worry me that if I wasn't careful my meekness could become a habit, a tic, something hardwired that my mannerisms would continue to express throughout my life regardless of my efforts - the way a drunk who, though in the wagon, still staggers and slurs like a drunk.”

— Lorrie Moore

“Habit is a second nature which prevents us from knowing the first, of which it has neither the cruelties nor the enchantments.”

— Marcel Proust

“I regularly take my entrepreneurship students out walking because I want to get them in the habit of noticing and thinking about what they notice. They have to leave their phones behind to learn the basic lesson: Be where you are.”

— Margaret Heffernan

“Why do you like jellyfish so much?" I asked.
"I don't know. I guess I think they're cute," she said. "But one thing did occur to me when I was really focused on them. What we see before us is just one tiny part of the world. We get into the habit of thinking, This is the world, but that's not true at all. The real world is in a much darker and deeper place than this, and most of it is occupied by jellyfish and things. We just happen to forget all that. Don't you agree? Two thirds of the earth's surface is ocean, and all we can see of it with the naked eye is the surface: the skin. We hardly know anything about what's beneath the skin.”

— Haruki Murakami

“I never have any clothes to go out in, because I always just buy for work. I don't know why. Habit.”

— Savannah Guthrie

“The worst mistake of first contact, made throughout history by individuals on both sides of every new encounter, has been the unfortunate habit of making assumptions. It often proved fatal.”

— David Brin

“What do you want me to do? he whispers into the empty air.
It's hard to know.
Oh Jimmy, you were so funny.
Don't let me down.
From habit he lifts his watch; it shows him its blank face.
Zero hour, Snowman thinks. Time to go.”

— Margaret Atwood

“Twitter's probably my bad habit.”

— Nicola Sturgeon

“I am a creature of habit.”

— Jennifer Aniston

“They have not always elected the best leaders, particularly after a long period in which they have not used this facility of free election. You tend to lose the habit.”

— Chinua Achebe

“The difference between a path and a road is not only the obvious one. A path is little more than a habit that comes with knowledge of a place. It is a sort of ritual of familiarity. As a form, it is a form of contact with a known landscape. It is not destructive. It is the perfect adaptation, through experience and familiarity, of movement to place; it obeys the natural contours; such obstacles as it meets it goes around.”

— Wendell Berry

“But habits emerge without our permission. Studies indicate that families usually don't intend to eat fast food on a regular basis. What happens is that a once a month pattern slowly becomes once a week, and then twice a week-as the cues and rewards create a habit-until the kids are consuming an unhealthy amount of hamburgers and fries.”

— Charles Duhigg

“Once you learn to quit, it becomes a habit.”

— Vince Lombardi

“Maylon Stark was medium-built and husky. That was the only word to fit him, husky. He had a husky face, and the nose on it was badly bent and flattened huskily. His voice was husky. His head sat huskily on his neck, the way a fighter carries his chin pulled in from habit. It was the huskiness of a man who hunches up his shoulders and hangs on hard with both hands. And with it Maylon Stark had a peculiar perpetual expression, like that of a man who is hanging hard onto the earth to keep it from moving away, out from under him. The line from the right side of his flattened nose to the corner of his mouth was three times as deep as the same line on the left side; his mouth did not curl, but the deepness of this line made him look like he was about to smile sardonically, or cry wearily, or sneer belligerently. You never knew which. And you never found out which. Because Maylon Stark never did any of them.”

— James Jones

“Maybe I'll even become a nun and swear off boys forever."
Scarlet turned to study me. "No. Your face wouldn't be good in a habit.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

“It is the habit of mankind to entrust to careless hope what they long for, and to use sovereign reason to thrust aside what they do not desire”

— Thucydides

“I had to learn to be honest with myself. I had to recognize my pain threshold. When I hit the floor, I have to realize it's not as if I broke a bone. Pushing yourself over the barrier is a habit. I know I can do it and try something else crazy. If you want to win the war, you've got to pay the price.”

— Flo Hyman

“God is our true Friend, who always gives us the counsel and comfort we need. Our danger lies in resisting Him; so it is essential that we acquire the habit of hearkening to His voice, or keeping silence within, and listening so as to lose nothing of what He says to us.”

— Francois Fenelon

“Life begins at forty, but so does arthritis, and the habit of telling the same story three times to the same person.”

— Sam Levenson

“If you have a habit of declaring milestones or changing them based on the crisis of the day, don't expect the team to remain motivated. Similarly, if the team isn't aware of the milestone and the value behind it, they are unlikely to deliver.”

— Martin Zwilling

“Considering that knowledge of the chemical as well as the optical principles of photography was fairly widespread following Schulze's experiment (in 1725) ... the circumstance that photography was not invented earlier remains the greatest mystery in its history ... It had apparently never occurred to any of the multitude of artists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who were in the habit of using the camera obscura to try to fix its image permanently.”

— Helmut Gernsheim

“The Buddha described his teaching as "going against the stream." The unflinching light of mindful awareness reveals the extent to which we are tossed along in the stream of past conditioning and habit. The moment we decide to stop and look at what is going on (like a swimmer suddenly changing course to swim upstream instead of downstream), we find ourselves battered by powerful currents we had never even suspected - precisely because until that moment we were largely living at their command.”

— Stephen Batchelor

“There should be a dash of the amateur in criticism. For the amateur is a man of enthusiasm who has not settled down and is not habit bound.”

— Brooks Atkinson

“A habit for all of us to develop would be to look for something to appreciate in everyone we meet. We can all be generous with appreciation. Everyone is grateful for it. It improves every human relationship, it brings new courage to people facing difficulties, and it brings out the best in everyone. So, give appreciation generously whenever you can. You will never regret it.”

— Carl Holmes

“Love that does not renew itself every day becomes a habit and in turn a slavery.”

— Khalil Gibran

“Once you realize that the world is your own projection, you are free of it. You need not free yourself of a world that does not exist, except in your own imagination! However is the picture, beautiful or ugly, you are painting it and you are not bound by it. Realize that there is nobody to force it on you, that it is due to the habit of taking the imaginary to be real. See the imaginary as imaginary and be free of fear.”

— Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

“Perfection consists in one thing alone, which is doing the will of God. For, according to Our Lord's words, it suffices for perfection to deny self, to take up the cross and to follow Him. Now who denies himself and takes up his cross and follows Christ better than he who seeks not to do his own will, but always that of God? Behold, now, how little is needed to become as Saint? Nothing more than to acquire the habit of willing, on every occasion, what God wills.”

— St. Vincent

“He must have known me if he had seen me as he was wont to see me, for he was in the habit of flogging me constantly. Perhaps he did not recognize me by my face.”

— Anthony Trollope

“As soon as I observed myself from outside myself, I recognized and understood that I had a long-standing habit of keeping an eye on myself. That's how I managed to pull myself together, over the years, checking myself from the outside.”

— Orhan Pamuk

“No war ought ever to be undertaken but under circumstances which render all intercourse of courtesy between the combatants impossible. It is a bad thing that men should hate each other; but it is far worse that they should contract the habit of cutting one another's throats without hatred. War is never lenient but where it is wanton; when men are compelled to fight in self-defence, they must hate and avenge: this may be bad; but it is human nature.”

— Thomas B. Macaulay

“Truly wealthy people develop the habit of "getting rich slow" rather than "getting rich quick." To assure this, they have two rules with regard to money. Rule number one: Don't lose money. Rule number two: If ever you feel tempted, refer back to rule number one, "don't lose money."”

— Brian Tracy

“So I was drawing in a lot of the habit district in Brazil, put that together with an Asian influence, so there are a lot of different things in terms of architecture which assisted in the construction. Then every sci-fi movie I've grown up with from 'Blade Runner' to 'Aliens' and 'Star Wars.'”

— Len Wiseman

“People look like rivers very much: water is everywhere the same, but the rivers are narrow, fast, wide, pure, cold, muddy and warm. The people are the same. They have the rudiment of every human habit in them and they behave according to them. Sometimes they even do not look like themselves, but they still stay whatever they are.”

— Leo Tolstoy

“There is not a more perilous or immoral habit of mind than the sanctifying of success.”

— Lord Acton

“For tens of millions of people [television] has become habit-forming, brain-softening, taste-degrading.”

— Louis Kronenberger

“[T]he habit of scientific analysis ... exhausts the material offered to it ...”

— Henri Frederic Amiel

“Before we can aspire to guide the destinies of India, we shall have to adopt the habit of fearlessness.”

— Mahatma Gandhi