Quotes About Habits

Habits are funny things. What's funny, or rather tragic, is that bad habits are so predictable and avoidable. Despite this, there are people by the millions who insist on acquiring habits that are bad, expensive, and create problems. The habit they weren't going to get, got them!

The only way we could remember would be by constant re-reading, for knowledge unused tends to drop out of mind. Knowledge used does not need to be remembered; practice forms habits and habits make memory unnecessary. The rule is nothing; the application is everything.

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.

Bad habits: easy to develop and hard to live with. Good habits: hard to develop and easy to live with.

Thoughts lead to acts, acts lead to habits, habits lead to character - and our character will determine our eternal destiny.

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

Ultimately, your state of mind determines your circumstances. To realize the outcomes you want, it is critical to recognize and experience the transition from our present thoughts, habits, and actions to new thoughts, habits, and actions.

Whatever your present situation, I assure you that you are not your habits. You can replace old patterns of self-defeating behavior with new patterns, new habits of the effectiveness, happiness and trust-based relationships.

Your closest relationships are often the ones that have the most effect on you, but they are frequently the ones most difficult to change. These relationships are complex and have long histories. Lifetime habits of avoiding being really present with each other may exist in many of them. Family members, for instance, might want to support you, but will not necessarily know how to genuinely listen or be present with you in a way that is enlivening. . . . Even with the best intentions, it can be very difficult to get beyond the past and into the Now.

As an actor, you're kind of aware of everything, or you try to be, so you take in certain habits or find certain things, such as how someone sits or how demure they are. You get those things about everybody.

We feel led to caution . . . against forming the bad habit of incurring debt and taking upon themselves obligations which frequently burden them heavier than they can bear, and lead to the loss of their homes and other possessions. We know it is the fashion of the age to use credit to the utmost limit. . . . We, therefore, repeat our counsel . . . to shun debt. Be content with moderate gains, and be not misled by illusory hopes of acquiring wealth. . . . Let our children also be taught habits of economy, and not to indulge in tastes which they cannot gratify without running into debt.

Science and Technology revolutionize our lives, but memory, tradition and myth frame our response. Expelled from individual consciousness by the rush of change, history finds its revenge by stamping the collective unconscious with habits, values, expectations, dreams. The dialectic between past and future will continue to form our lives.

Look at Mann's reading habits, his explicit comments on Nietzsche, and his copy of Birth of Tragedy, and it starts to seem doubtful that this work of Nietzsche's played much role in the gestation of the novella.

Your law may be perfect, your knowledge of human affairs may be such as to enable you to apply it with wisdom and skill, and yet without individual acquaintance with men, their haunts and habits, the pursuit of the profession becomes difficult, slow, and expensive.

If you are energy-efficient and water-wise at home, then take all your good habits abroad with you.

It's very hard to stop doing things you're used to doing. You almost have to dismantle yourself and scatter it all around and then put a blindfold on and put it back together so that you avoid old habits.

Self-awareness moves us beyond the old, well-worn pathways in the brain that support fixed, unconscious habits.

There is a lot of amiable fantasy written about trout fishing, but the truth is that few men know much if anything about the habits of trout and little more about the manner of taking them.

The laws should be rigidly enforced which prohibit the immigration of a servile class to compete with American labor, with no intention of acquiring citizenship, and bringing with them and retaining habits and customs repugnant to our civilization.

I think everyone thinks their dad is a little bit odd or crazy. As they get older, they develop their own little habits. They have a certain way that they like to live their life, and nothing is going to interrupt that.

So long as one is happy one can endure any discipline: it was unhappiness that broke down the habits of work.

Teaching children how to be eco-friendly at preschool age is just so obvious and so fantastic. It creates habits that they get into for a lifetime and then they put pressure on their parents.

Individuals out of work for an extended period can become less employable as they lose the specific skills acquired in their previous jobs and also lose the habits needed to hold down any job.

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.

Technological innovation has done great damage ... to eating habits. Food is now available in such unpleasant forms that one frequently finds smoking between courses to be an aid to digestion.

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.

Knowledge is the understanding of what, how and why we need to do something. Skill is applying that knowledge in a practical situation. Attitude is the desire to transform our knowledge into skills and ultimately into habits.

Few persons enjoy real liberty; we are all slaves to ideas or habits.

Much of eating is about customs and habits, and we've developed some unfortunate ones. Not enough families eat together. We eat in front of the TV while we're absorbed in a program. You know, the average person will eat up to 50 percent more food when distracted.

Where can I find a man governed by reason instead of habits and urges?

But can one still make resolutions when one is over forty? I live according to twenty-year-old habits.

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

Habits, good or bad, can always be traced back to your own thinking.

If a person has ten habits out of which nine are good and one bad, that bad one will destroy the good ones.

Several country towns, within my observation, have at least a dozen taverns. Here the time, the money, the health and the modesty, of most that are young and of many old, are wasted. Here diseases, vicious habits, bastards and legislators are frequently spawned.

Things start out as hopes and end up as habits.

Good sound habits are more important than rules - use concepts.

Travel is not really about leaving our homes, but leaving our habits.

A good deal of education consists of unlearning-the breaking of bad habits as with a tennis serve.

We've all got out self-destructive bad habits, the trick is to find four or five you personally like the best and just do those all the time.

Education has no more serious responsibility than the making of adequate provision for enjoyment of recreative leisure not only for the sake of immediate health, but for the sake of its lasting effect upon the habits of the mind.

Small habits well pursued betimes May reach the dignity of crimes.

Your character is the harvest of your habits.

I recognize this in my writing process. A consistent writing structure opens the door to amazing insights. I recognize the truth of this in my daily habits. When I set my keys in the place I, with practice, always set my keys... I do not lose them. In many instances an ordered external structure can be an invitation for an extraordinarily unfettered, creative and unbounded inner structure.

Fernanda, on the other hand, looked for it in vain along the paths of her everyday itinerary without knowing that the search for lost things is hindered by routine habits and that is why it is so difficult to find them.

Liberty is not to be enjoyed, indeed it cannot exist, without the habits of just subordination; it consists, not so much in removing all restraint from the orderly, as in imposing it on the violent.

Our self image and our habits tend to go together. Change one and you will automatically change the other.

Habits are the shorthand of behavior.