Quotations about Habits

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


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


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


Ill habits gather by unseen degrees -
As brooks make rivers, rivers run to seas.
~John Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel, 1681


Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going. ~Jim Ryun


Bad habits are easier to abandon today than tomorrow. ~Yiddish Proverb


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


Habit, if not resisted, soon becomes necessity. ~St. Augustine


The second half of a man's life is made up of nothing but the habits he has acquired during the first half. ~Feodor Dostoevski


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, The Gay Science, 1882


Habits are at first cobwebs, then cables. ~Spanish Proverb


The hard must become habit. The habit must become easy. The easy must become beautiful. ~Doug Henning


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


The easier it is to do, the harder it is to change. ~Eng's Principle


The satisfied, the happy, do not live; they fall asleep in habit, near neighbor to annihilation. ~Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life, 1913


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


Habit is thus the enormous flywheel 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, The Principles of Psychology


In any family, measles are less contagious than bad habits. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


Men's natures are alike; it is their habits that separate them. ~Confucius, Analects


Habit with him was all the test of truth;
It must be right: I've done it from my youth.
~George Crabbe, The Borough


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


Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits. ~Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar for 1894


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


To fall into a habit is to begin to cease to be. ~Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life


Habit is a man's sole comfort. We dislike doing without even unpleasant things to which we have become accustomed. ~Goethe


The best way to break a bad habit is to drop it. ~Leo Aikman


Every grown-up man consists wholly of habits, although he is often unaware of it and even denies having any habits at all. ~Georges Gurdjieff