Selected habit quotes

1. I have Social Disease. I have to go out every night. If I stay home one night I start spreading rumors to my dogs.

2. For legislators make the citizens good by forming habits in them, and this is the wish of every legislator, and those who do not effect it miss their mark, and it is in this that a good constitution differs from a bad one.

3. The moral virtues, then, are produced in us neither by nature nor against nature. Nature, indeed, prepares in us the ground for their reception, but their complete formation is the product of habit.

4. Sooner or later, I'll be punctual.

5. I didn't mind being a public executioner, once I got the hang of it.

6. If coffee didn't exist, somebody would have to invent it for me very soon.

7. I am irrevocably committed to being permanently indecisive.

8. The arbitrary rule of a just and enlightened prince is always bad. His virtues are the most dangerous and the surest form of seduction: they lull a people imperceptibly into the habit of loving, respecting, and serving his successor, whoever that successor may be, no matter how wicked or stupid.

9. They defend their errors as if they were defending their inheritance.

10. Whatever you would make habitual, practice it; and if you would not make a thing habitual, do not practice it, but accustom yourself to something else.

11. Choose the life that is noblest, for custom can make it sweet to thee.

12. Kindness can become its own motive. We are made kind by being kind.

13. First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.

14. A master passion is the love of news.

15. He tried the luxury of doing good.

16. Circus dogs jump when the trainer cracks his whip, but the really well-trained dog is the one that turns his somersault when there is no whip.

17. A man who waits to believe in action before acting is anything you like, but he's not a man of action. It is as if a tennis player before returning a ball stopped to think about his views of the physical and mental advantages of tennis. You must act as you breathe.

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

19. Good character is not formed in a week or a month. It is created little by little, day by day. Protracted and patient effort is needed to develop good character.

20. To do the same thing over and over again is not only boredom: it is to be controlled by rather than to control what you do.

21. There are only two occasions when Americans respect privacy, especially in Presidents. Those are prayer and fishing.

22. When the dog is repeatedly teased with the sight of objects inducing salivary secretion from a distance, the reaction of the salivary glands grows weaker and weaker and finally drops to zero.

23. I become drunk as circumstances dictate.

24. It is curious how tyrannical the habit of reading is, and what shifts we make to escape thinking. There is no bore we dread being left alone with so much as our own minds.

25. Why do people build houses to keep the climate out, then cut holes in the walls to let it in again? I shall never understand.

26. What's drinking? A mere pause from thinking!

27. There warn't anybody at the church, except maybe a hog or two, for there warn't any lock on the door, and hogs likes a puncheon floor in summer-time because it's cool. If you notice, most folks don't go to church only when they've got to; but a hog is different.

28. I've found that the chief difficulty for most people was to realize that they had really heard new things: that is things that they had never heard before. They kept translating what they heard into their habitual language. They had ceased to hope and believe there might be anything new.

29. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote.

30. A man may write at any time, if he will set himself doggedly to it.

31. Back in my rummy days, I would tremble and shake for hours upon arising. It was the only exercise I got.

32. The most intellectual of men are moved quite as much by the circumstances which they are used to as by their own will. The active voluntary part of a man is very small, and if it were not economized by a sleepy kind of habit, its results would be null.

33. There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.

34. Habit rules the unreflecting herd.

35. I do think unpunctuality is a vile habit, and all my life I have tried to break myself of it.

36. I accumulated in those years so fine a surplus in the Book of Observance that I have been drawing confidently upon it ever since.

37. When I was younger I made it a rule never to take strong drink before lunch. It is now my rule never to do so before breakfast.

38. Habit is Heaven's own redress: it takes the place of happiness.

39. Men acquire a particular quality by constantly acting a particular way... you become just by performing just actions, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave actions.

40. Please don't tell me there's no need to worry - it's the only thing I'm any good at.

41. Self-discipline, as a virtue or an acquired asset, can be invaluable to anyone.

42. We still do not yet know where the drive for truth comes from. For so far we have heard only of the duty which society imposes in order to exist: to be truthful means to employ the usual metaphors. Thus, to express it morally, this is the duty to lie according to a fixed convention, to lie with the herd and in a manner binding upon everyone. Now man of course forgets that this is the way things stand for him. Thus he lies in the manner indicated, unconsciously and in accordance with habits which are centuries' old; and precisely by means of this unconsciousness and forgetfulness he arrives at his sense of truth.

43. One will rarely err if extreme actions be ascribed to vanity, ordinary actions to habit, and mean actions to fear.

44. Es ist wahr: wir lieben das Leben, nicht, weil wir an's Leben, sondern weil wir an's Lieben gewohnt sind.

45. If there is no means to prevent drunkenness, a man may become drunk thrice a month; if he oversteps this limit he makes himself guilty of a punishable offence. If he is drunk only twice a month, that is better - if only once, that is more praiseworthy. What could be better than that he should not drink at all? But where shall we find a man who never drinks? If, however, such a man is found, he deserves every respect.

46. Those who marry God can become domesticated too-it's just as hum-drum a marriage as all the others. The word 'Love' means a formal touch of the lips as in the ceremony of the Mass, and 'Ave Maria' like 'dearest' is a phrase to open a letter. This marriage like the world's marriages was held together by habits and tastes shared in common between God and themselves-it was God's taste to be worshipped and their taste to worship, but only at stated hours like a suburban embrace on a Saturday night.

47. I was an idealist in my profession. If I used such expression as 'Jewish bastard' or 'Jewish sow,' it simply meant that this official language had become so much a part of my flesh and blood that I saw nothing unusual in it. I never used anything but spiritual weapons in dealing with offenders.

48. Outside the building, she started to walk west to Lexington to catch the bus. Between Third and Lexington, she reached into her coat pocket for her purse and found the sandwich half. She took it out and started to bring her arm down, to drop the sandwich into the street, but instead she put it back into her pocket. A few years before, it had taken her three days to dispose of the Easter chick she had found dead on the sawdust in the bottom of her wastebasket.

49. You eat everyday, you sleep everyday, your body was made to exercise everyday.

50. If an addict who has been completely cured starts smoking again he no longer experiences the discomfort of his first addiction. There exists, therefore, outside alkaloids and habit, a sense for opium, an intangible habit which lives on, despite the recasting of the organism.... The dead drug leaves a ghost behind. At certain hours it haunts the house.

51. The spirits that I summoned up I now can't rid myself of.

52. Schon war ich auch, und das war mein Verderben.

53. The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.

54. O Ingles, sem cha, bate-se frouxamente.

55. What do you ever add to the fucking preceedings? You've got one answer for everything, 'Pussy, Man'.

56. Life is full of decisions and judgments and guesses, and it gets to the point where you're so accustomed to making them you keep right on making them even when you don't strictly need to. You get into a what if thing, and you start speculating about what you would do if some problem was yours instead of somebody else's. It gets to be a habit. It was a habit Jack Reacher had in spades.

57. We think we want to do something and when it comes to it, we don't. We don't like to commit.

58. There are pretenses which are very sincere, and marriage is their school.

59. To fall into a habit is to begin to cease to be.

60. Any idea, plan, or purpose may be placed in the mind through repetition of thought.

61. I'm like a junky without an addiction.

62. Blizzard was of the fine old school of butlers. His appearance suggested that for fifteen years he had not let a day pass without its pint of port. He radiated port and pop-eyed dignity. He had splay feet and three chins, and when he walked his curving waistcoat preceded him like the advance guard of some royal procession.

63. 'Suppose your Aunt Dahlia read in the paper one morning that you were going to be shot at sunrise.' 'I couldn't be, I'm never up so early.'

64. Love is an act of endless forgiveness, a tender look which becomes a habit.

65. Playwrights are like men who have been dining for a month in an Indian restaurant. After eating curry night after night, they deny the existence of asparagus.

66. In one of the most brilliant papers in the English language [David] Hume made it clear that what we speak of as 'causality' is nothing more than the phenomenon of repetition. When we mix sulphur with saltpeter and charcoal we always get gunpowder. This is true of every event subsumed by a causal law - in other words, everything which can be called scientific knowledge. 'It is custom which rules,' Hume said, and in that one sentence undermined both science and philosophy.

67. To me, song writing is so therapeutic, it's just part of my life and I can't go through the day without having some kind of song idea pop into my head where I have to write Sharpie all over my arm trying to remember the song idea.

68. Lazy people are always looking for something to do.

69. It's when you watch TV