Quotes About Habits

Good character consists of knowing the good, desiring the good, and doing the good habits of the mind, habits of the heart, and habits of action.

Habit is habit and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time. You cannot eliminate habits that no longer serve you. You can only replace them with new habits that support your goals. Moment by moment, you need to live with awareness and structure the habits that you include or exclude in your days.

I am a hopeless materialist. I see the soul as nothing else than the sim of activities of the organism plus personal habits - plus inherited habits, memories, experiences, of the organism. I believe that when I am dead, I am dead. I believe that with my death I am just as much obliterated as the last mosquito you and I squashed.

The great make its feel, first of all, the indifference of circumstances. They call into activity the higher perceptions, and subdue the low habits of comfort and luxury; but the higher perceptions find their objects everywhere; only the low habits need palaces and banquets.

To change bad habits, we must study the habits of successful role models.

The habits of a lifetime when everything else had to come before writing are not easily broken, even when circumstances now often make it possible for writing to be first; habits of years - responses to others, distractibility, responsibility for daily matters - stay with you, mark you, become you. The cost of discontinuity (that pattern still imposed on women) is such a weight of things unsaid, an accumulation of material so great, that everything starts up something else in me; what should take weeks take me sometimes months to write; what should take months, takes years.

It will be difficult to break the habits of thinking Abnegation instilled in me, like tugging a single thread from a complex work of embroidery. But I will find new habits, new thoughts, new rules. I will become something else.

Old habits are hard to forget, and old fears are habits.

There are more obese people in the world than starving people. As China and India start to develop our eating habits - and not by accident but because agribusiness is going over there and imposing our habits on them - if the population doesn't increase at all, we'll have to raise twice as many animals as we do.

I don't always have the best eating habits. I like butter and ice cream. There are days when I should work out and I don't. But it's never too late to change old habits.

Watch your actions, they become your habits. Watch your habits, they become your character.

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

Once you understand that habits can change, you have the freedom and the responsibility to remake them. Once you understand that habits can be rebuilt, the power of habit becomes easier to grasp and the only option left is to get to work.

People allow themselves to be slaves of their bad habits and society's bad habits - but they have free will, and if they wish to be free they can.

Music fills the infinite between two souls. This has been muffled by the mist of our daily habits.

Despair leads to boredom, electronic games, computer hacking, poetry and other bad habits.

The simplicity of winter has a deep moral. The return of Nature, after such a career of splendor and prodigality, to habits so simple and austere, is not lost either upon the head or the heart. It is the philosopher coming back from the banquet and the wine to a cup of water and a crust of bread.

I was hoping to be a healthy example, because we can't all look like all of these actresses and the models you see on the covers of magazine. And they aren't doing it healthfully anyway, I promise you. And I could not believe the backlash. I could not believe that people twisted and turned that story - and accused me of having body image issues or an eating disorder. And then someone explained to me that most people on the planet probably don't know what Weight Watchers is, that it's really just about good eating habits.

People have been predicting the death of television for 20 years now, and so far it's been entirely wrong. But it does seem viewership habits are starting to change.

The outward is only the outside of that which is within. Men are not concealed under habits, but are revealed by them; they are their true clothes.

When you're literally carrying a child you can cut back on bad habits.

My plan of instruction is extremely simple and limited. They learn, on week-days, such coarse works as may fit them for servants. I allow of no writing for the poor. My object is not to make fanatics, but to train up the lower classes in habits of industry and piety.

For the most part we inherit our opinions. We are the heirs of habits and mental customs. Our beliefs, like the fashion of our garments, depend on where we were born. We are molded and fashioned by our surroundings.

Generally a good parameter for me is to try something I haven't done before either in the writing or recording process, to break old patterns and habits. Even if I eventually return to something similar, I'll have gotten there from a different starting point and engaged in a different process.

There are certain bad habits we've groomed our whole life -- from personality flaws to fashion faux pas. And it has been the role of parents and friends, outside of some minor tweaking, to reinforce the belief that we're okay just as we are. But it's not enough to just be yourself. You have to be your best self. And that's a tall order if you haven't found your best self yet.

Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us - then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls.

When it comes to breaking old habits and starting new ones, remember to be patient with yourself. If you've spent twenty, thirty, or forty years or more repeating the behaviors you're now trying to change, you've got to expect it's going to take time and effort before you see lasting results.

Our volitional habits depend, then, first, on what the stock of ideas is which we have; and, second, on the habitual coupling of the several ideas with action or inaction respectively.

Every writer, by the way he uses the language, reveals something of his spirit, his habits, his capacities, his bias....Avoid the elaborate, the pretentious, the coy, and the cute. Do not be tempted by a twenty-dollar word when there is a ten-center handy, ready and able.

But you go to a great school, not for knowledge so much as for arts and habits; for the habit of attention, for the art of expression, for the art of assuming at a moment's notice a new intellectual posture, for the art of entering quickly into another person's thoughts, for the habit of submitting to censure and refutation, for the art of indicating assent or dissent in graduated terms, for the habit of regarding minute points of accuracy, for the habit of working out what is possible in a given time, for taste, for discrimination, for mental courage and mental soberness.

Falling is scary but good practice for life. We must fall. In love. Out of love. Into new experiences. Out of old habits. Deeper and further into ourselves. We must fall, life is falling over forward. The only choice we have is how we let go.

When life appears to be working against you, when your luck is down, when the supposedly wrong people show up, or when you slip up and return to old, self-defeating habits, recognize the signs that you're out of harmony with intention.

Habits, scientists say, emerge because the brain is constantly looking for ways to save effort.

Habits wear more constantly and with greatest force than reason, which, when we have most need of it, is seldom fairly consulted, and more rarely obeyed

Instead of recommending cleanliness to the poor, we should encourage contrary habits. In our towns we should make the streets narrower, crowd more people into the houses, and court the return of the plague.

The catastrophe of the atomic bombs which shook men out of cities and businesses and economic relations, shook them also out of their old-established habits of thought, and out of the lightly held beliefs and prejudices that came down to them from the past.

A man who raises himself by degrees to wealth and power, contracts, in the course of this protracted labor, habits of prudence and restraint which he cannot afterwards shake off. A man cannot gradually enlarge his mind as he does his house.

Habits are malleable throughout your entire life.

If Jacob was right and clothes were costumes and makeup a mask, then our attitudes and habits must be our shields.

Marco Polo tells the tale of The Old Man in the Mountains and how he recruits new members to his Band of Assassins by means of drugs, beautiful women, lush gardens, and religious promises. The unfortunate thing about this world is that the good habits are much easier to give up than the bad ones.

My writing habits are pretty static. I get up every morning between 6 and 7 am, grab a cup of coffee, say a few prayers, and go downstairs to my office and start writing.

It will never be the case that people won't eat meat. I think it could conceivably be the case one day that people eat very small amounts of it. That it's a special thing, rather than reach for it because it's cheap or reach for it because it's convenient, that it becomes something festive or something celebratory, once a week, and that could actually be achieved on small farms if we really changed our habits.

The mind of the beginner is empty, free of the habits of the experts, ready to accept, to doubt, and open to all possibilities.

It is because the body is a machine that education is possible. Education is the formation of habits, a superinducing of an artificial organization upon the natural organization of the body.

It is difficult for a fool's habits to change to selflessness.

A birthday is a good time to begin a new; throwing away the old habits, as you would old clothes, and never putting them again.

Diversity...is not casual liberal tolerance of anything not yourself. It is not polite accommodation. Instead, diversity is, in action, the sometimes painful awareness that other people, other races, other voices, other habits of mind have as much integrity of being, as much claim on the world as you do... And I urge you, amid all the differences present to the eye and mind, to reach out to create the bond that...will protect us all. We are all meant to be here together.

If we don't progress, we backslide into bad habits, laziness and poor attitude.