Habit Quotes

“First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you're inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won't. Habit is persistence in practice.”
― Octavia Butler, Bloodchild and Other Stories

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living.”
― Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

“We first make our habits, then our habits make us.”
― John Dryden

“For those who are poor in happiness, each time is a first time; happiness never becomes a habit.”
― Marilyn Monroe, My Story

“Typically, people who exercise, start eating better and becoming more productive at work. They smoke less and show more patience with colleagues and family. They use their credit cards less frequently and say they feel less stressed. Exercise is a keystone habit that triggers widespread change.”
― Charles Duhigg, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business

“Habit is the intersection of knowledge (what to do), skill (how to do), and desire (want to do).”
― Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change

“Every habit he's ever had is still there in his body, lying dormant like flowers in the desert. Given the right conditions, all his old addictions would burst into full and luxuriant bloom.”
― Margaret Atwood

“As Aristotle said, 'Excellence is a habit.' I would say furthermore that excellence is made constant through the feeling that comes right after one has completed a work which he himself finds undeniably awe-inspiring. He only wants to relax until he's ready to renew such a feeling all over again because to him, all else has become absolutely trivial.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“The most basic way to get someone's attention is this: Break a pattern.”
― Chip Heath and Dan Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

“Nothing is stronger than habit.”
― Ovid

“These virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions ... The good of man is a working of the soul in the way of excellence in a complete life.”
― Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics

“This process within our brains is a three-step loop. First, there is a cue, a trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use. Then there is the routine, which can be physical or mental or emotional. Finally, there is a reward, which helps your brain figure out if this particular loop is worth remembering for the future: THE HABIT LOOP”
― Charles Duhigg, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business

“One should cultivate good habits of memory, for it is capable of making existence a Paradise or an Inferno.”
― Baltasar Gracián, The Art of Worldly Wisdom: A Pocket Oracle

“The time which we have at our disposal every day is elastic; the passions that we feel expand it, those that we inspire contract it; and habit fills up what remains.”
― Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

“I think I am beginning to understand why grief feels like suspense. It comes from the frustration of so many impulses that had become habitual. Thought after thought feeling after feeling, action after action, had H. for their object. Now their target is gone. I keep on through habit fitting an harrow to the string, then I remember and have to lay the bow down. So many roads lead thought to H. I set out on one of them. But now there's an impassable frontierpost across it. So many roads once; now so many culs de sac.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

“For the wise have always known that no one can make much of his life until self-searching has become a regular habit, until he is able to admit and accept what he finds, and until he patiently and persistently tries to correct what is wrong. – Bill W.”
― Bill W.

“Really, it had been stupid to expect anything anyway. A few late nights does not a habit, or a relationship, make.”
― Sarah Dessen, Along for the Ride

“Astride of a grave and a difficult birth.
Down in the hole, lingeringly, the grave digger puts on the forceps.
We have time to grow old.
The air is full of our cries.
But habit is a great deadener.
At me too someone is looking, of me too someone is saying, He is sleeping, he knows nothing.
Let him sleep on.”
― Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

“When you showed someone how you felt, it was fresh and honest. When you told someone how you felt, there might be nothing behind the words but habit or expectation.”
― Jodi Picoult, Handle with Care

“Some of the freckles I once loved are now closer to liver spots. But it’s still the eyes we look at, isn’t it? That’s where we found the other person, and find them still.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“I believe Jesus wasn't thinking about miracle when He performed it.
He's just doing normal activities as he did in His heavenly kingdom.”
― Toba Beta

“All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits.”
― William James

“Most of our faculties lie dormant because they can rely upon Habit, which knows what there is to be done and has no need of their services.”
― Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past: Volume I - Swann's Way & Within a Budding Grove

“Habits stay with you even when you don’t have the motivation.”
― Neeraj Agnihotri, Procrasdemon - The Artist's Guide to Liberation from Procrastination

“No one is born to courage, Juliet. Courage is a habit you develop after cowardice has gotten you nothing.”
― Sabrina Jeffries, A Dangerous Love

“It is well said, then, that it is by doing just acts that the just man is produced, and by doing temperate acts the temperate man; without doing these no one would have even a prospect of becoming good.”
― Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics

“The mind is like tofu. It tastes like whatever you marinate it in.”
― Sylvia Boorstein

“All that coastline we've been sailing pas is it, but I guess back in the Roman times it was called ... what'd you say, Jason? Bodacious?'
'Dalmatia', Nico said, making Jason jump.
Holy Romulus ... Jason wished he could put a bell around Nico di Angelo's neck to remind him the guy was there.
Nico has this disturbing habit of standing silently in the corner, blending into the shadows.”
― Rick Riordan, The House of Hades

“Part of the problem about authenticity is that virtues aren't the only things that are habit forming: the more someone behaves in a way that is damaging to self or to others, the more "natural" it will both seem and actually be. Spontaneity, left to itself, can begin by excusing bad behavior and end by congratulating vice.”
― N.T. Wright, After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters

“Habits and customs are a convenience devised for the support of timid natures who dare not allow their souls free play.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader