Quotes and passages on habit

Good habits are worth
being fanatical about.

John Irving

How people keep correcting us when we are young! There's always some bad habit or other they tell us we ought to get over. Yet most bad habits are tools to get us through life. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

If you do not pour water on your plant, what will happen? It will slowly wither and die. Our habits will also slowly wither and die away if we do not give them an opportunity to manifest. You need not fight to stop a habit. Just don’t give it an opportunity to repeat itself. Swami Satchidananda Yoga Sutras of Patanjali You do anything long enough to escape the habit of living until the escape becomes the habit. David Ryan

Good habits once established are just as hard to break as bad habits, and bad habits are easier to abandon today than tomorrow. So what are you going to do about it? Lucas Remmerswaal

Attitudes are nothing more than habits of thoughts, and habits can be acquired. An action repeated becomes an attitude realized. Paul Myer

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

Mark Twain

quotations - contents - welcome page - obstacles
the people behind the words - our current e-zine - articles and excerpts
Daily Meditations, Year One - Year Two - Year Three - Year Four

Sign up for your free daily spiritual or general quotation ~ ~ Sign up for your free daily meditation

Know that every bad habit is a thornbush.
After all, how often have you stepped on its thorns?

Jalal al-Din Rumi

Sometimes I get the feeling that we're just a bunch of habits. The
gestures we repeat over and over, they're just our need to be
recognized. Without them, we'd be unidentifiable. We have to
reinvent ourselves every minute.

Nicole Krauss
Man Walks Into a Room

Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits.

Mark Twain

Some rules are nothing but old habits that people are afraid to change.

Therese Anne Fowler
Souvenir

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.

Henry Hazlitt

The soul grows into lovely habits as easily as into ugly ones, and the moment a life begins to blossom into beautiful words and deeds, that moment a new standard of conduct is established, and your eager neighbors look to you for a continuous manifestation of the good cheer, the sympathy, the ready wit, the comradeship, or the inspiration, you once showed yourself capable of. Bear figs for a season or two, and the world outside the orchard is very unwilling you should bear thistles.

Kate Douglas Wiggin
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm

Habits are safer than rules; you don't have to watch them.
And you don't have to keep them, either. They keep you.

Frank Crane

Every grown-up person consists wholly of habits, although one is often
unaware of it and even denies having any habits at all.

Georges Gurdjieff

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

Samuel Johnson

We have some inspiring and motivational books that may interest you. Our main way of supporting this site is through the sale of books, either physical copies or digital copies for your Amazon Kindle (including the online reader). All of the money that we earn through them comes back to the site in one way or another. Just click on the picture to the left to visit our page of books, both fiction and non-fiction!

Not all habits are helpful, and bad habits can become cruel masters that are detrimental to our well-being. Smoking, drinking, and taking drugs can rapidly develop into habits sabotaging our health and our relationships with others. While the dangers of addictive drugs are becoming more obvious each day, sometimes habits that are much more subtle can be just as detrimental to our development into successful individuals. . . .

By the time a behavior pattern becomes a habit, it can feel so familiar that it seems to be a natural part of us, but, in fact, habits are learned and practiced. Just as we have learned them over time, we can "unlearn" these practiced behaviors. By observing yourself, you can become aware of the habitual ways you think and act that could be harmful. When you're conscious of a habit you want to change, you can unlearn it by replacing the automatic behavior with a different, more thoughtful response. You may make mistakes or slip back into old ways, but it's important not to give up. Simply correct your behavior as soon as you're aware that you've slipped back into the old habit. Determine how to be the master of your habits, so that your habits can be useful servants to you.

John Marks Templeton
Worldwide Laws of Life

Habits have been given for your strengthening, but they cease to
be purposeful when you become subservient to them. No one
is a master who is slave to his or her own inventions.

Alan Cohen

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

Peace Pilgrim

Articles and book excerpts on habits:

Tremendously Rewarding Habits Steve Brunkhorst

A habit is something you can do without thinking--
which is why most of us have so many of them.

Frank A. Clark

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

Somerset Maugham

Enduring habits I hate. . . . Yes, at the very bottom of my soul I feel grateful
to all my misery and bouts of sickness and everything about me that is
imperfect, because this sort of thing leaves me with a hundred backdoors
through which I can escape from enduring habits.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Habits are at first cobwebs, then cables.

Spanish proverb

Habits? The only reason they persist is that they are offering some satisfaction.
You allow them to persist by not seeking any other, better form of satisfying
the same needs. Every habit, good or bad, is acquired and learned in the
same way--by finding that it is a means of satisfaction.

Juliene Berk

Have you ever fully realized that life is, after all, merely a series of
habits, and that it lies entirely within one's own power
to determine just what that series shall be?

Ralph Waldo Trine

Habit, if not resisted, soon becomes necessity.

St. Augustine

Moral excellence comes about as a result of habit. We become just by doing
just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.

Aristotle

No one is born with habits, good or not so good. They feed on
repetition of an act or a thought. Even with the act, the thought
comes first. You can master and overcome your habits, whatever
they are. They were not inherited, nor were they laid upon you.
They were acquired. If your subconscious mind can learn one
habit of reaction, it can form others. You can change.
You don't have to stay any one way.

Eric Butterworth

The nature of people is always the same; it is their habits that separate them.

Confucius

Life is never a habit with me. It is always a marvel.

Katherine Mansfield

No habit has any real hold on you
other than the hold you have on it.

Gardner Hunting

As long as habit and routine dictate the pattern of
living, new dimensions of the soul will not emerge.

Henry van Dyke

It is very important to realize that we are creatures of habit. Every time
we think a certain way, seek a certain good, use a given motive, a habit
is forming and deepening in us. Like a groove that is being furrowed,
each repetition adds a new depth to the habit.

John Powell

As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought
will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we
walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over
and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.

Henry David Thoreau

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

Jeremy Taylor

We seldom get rid of an evil merely by understanding its causes. . . and
for all our insight, obstinate habits do not disappear until replaced by
other habits. No amount of confession and no amount of explaining can
make the crooked plant grow straight; it must be trained
upon the trellis by the gardener's art.

Carl Jung

Your habits can be your friends or your enemies;
they can help you or hurt you.

Maxwell Martz