Selected habits quotes

1. Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.

2. How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.

3. It is easy to perform a good action, but not easy to acquire a settled habit of performing such actions.

4. We become just by performing just action, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave action.

5. Resolutions are flying like snowflakes around here.

6. I'll give up my bad habits as soon as equally satisfying good habits become available.

7. You are what you eat, but eventually you become what eats you.

8. There's no harm in talking to yourself, but try to avoid telling yourself jokes you've heard before.

9. Reading isn't good for a ballplayer. Not good for his eyes. If my eyes went bad even a little bit I couldn't hit home runs. So I gave up reading.

10. People's dreams are made out of what they do all day. The same way a dog that runs after rabbits will dream of rabbits. It's what you do that makes your soul, not the other way around.

11. Do not deny the classical approach, simply as a reaction, or you will have created another pattern and trapped yourself there.

12. Make at least one definite move daily toward your goal.

13. The spirit of the individual is determined by his dominating thought habits.

14. The mind is like a fertile garden in which anything that is planted, flowers or weeds, will grow.

15. We are far more liable to catch the vices than the virtues of our associates.

16. There is nothing so habit-forming as money.

17. I really do work in solitude.

18. In order to read one must sit down, usually indoors. I am restless and would rather sail a boat than crack a book. I've never had a very lively literary curiosity, and it has sometimes seemed to me that I am not really a literary fellow at all. Except that I write for a living.

19. All men that are ruined, are ruined on the side of their natural propensities.

20. Onion rings in the car cushions do not improve with time.

21. There's something wrong with a mother who washes out a measuring cup with soap and water after she's only measured water in it.

22. The idea that to make a man work you've got to hold gold in front of his eyes is a growth, not an axiom. We've done that for so long that we've forgotten there's any other way.

23. I go to bed early; my favorite dream comes on at nine.

24. Rise early, that by habit it may become familiar, agreeable, healthy, and profitable. It may, for a while, be irksome to do this, but that will wear off; and the practice will produce a rich harvest forever thereafter; whether in public or private walks of life.

25. I've bought more music for my Ipod in one year than I bought in the last ten years of my life.

26. Since trifles make the sum of human things, And half our misery from our foibles springs.

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

28. One has to grow up with good talk in order to form the habit of it.

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

30. I have a lot of tics and phobias. I hate to travel. I hate to go to festivals. I hate it when somebody gets close behind me. I'm scared of the darkness. I hate open doors.

31. The law of harvest is to reap more than you sow. Sow an act, and you reap a habit. Sow a habit and you reap a character. Sow a character and you reap a destiny.

32. I had learnt from experience that many false opinions may be exchanged for true ones, without in the least altering the habits of mind of which false opinions are made.

33. The best doctors in the world are Doctor Diet, Doctor Quiet, and Doctor Merryman.

34. I totally related to Cole Porter's magnetic pull to any piano that was in the room, which he was famous for doing, as was Gershwin. You couldn't drag them away from a piano.

35. Every once in a while someone without a single bad habit gets caught.

36. You won't skid if you stay in a rut.

37. Things start out as hopes and end up as habits.

38. Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.

39. Nothing is stronger than habit.

40. I now realize that taking drugs was like taking an aspirin without having a headache.

41. The only reason I don't quit smoking is because I fear that if I did, I'd become one of you.

42. How much do you smoke, sir? A pack a week? Why don't you just put on a dress and swish around : I go through two lighters a day.

43. 'But that's just the point,' groaned Bree. 'Do Talking Horses roll? Supposing they don't? I can't bear to give it up. What do you think, Hwin?' 'I'm going to roll anyway,' said Hwin. 'I don't suppose any of them will care two lumps of sugar whether you roll or not.' (ch. 15)

44. We hardly ever realize that we can cut anything out of our lives, anytime, in the blink of an eye.

45. Bad actors with bad habits Some sad singers They just play tragic.

46. 'Cause a costume can be comfortable It can make you feel more beautiful It can even make you look like someone else But it's still you, so there's nothing you can do Like a bad habit, the one you couldn't kick, there it always is And it's nothing that no doctor's gonna fix.

47. Hip flasks are the juice machines of the alcohol world - everyone has one and it never gets used.

48. As for the brandy, 'nothing extenuate;' and the water, put nought in it malice.

49. In the course of an average lifetime anyone growing up in a house with such a clock will hear the tune over a million times.

50. Ce qui nous empeche souvent de nous abandonner a un seul vice est que nous en avons plusieurs.

51. 'I've stopped drinking, but only while I'm asleep.'

52. I'm a tidy sort of bloke. I don't like chaos. I kept records in the record rack, tea in the tea caddy, and pot in the pot box.

53. I find television very educational. Every time someone switches it on I go into another room and read a good book.

54. I started smoking as soon as I went on the stage. I'd make cigars out of the Morning World when I was a kid.

55. To get out of bed on the wrong side probably means that you had had too much the night before.

56. Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.

57. Habit is a cable; we weave a thread of it each day, and at last we cannot break it.

58. Manners easily and rapidly mature into morals.

59. Resolve to edge in a little reading every day, if it is but a single sentence. If you gain fifteen minutes a day, it will make itself felt at the end of the year.

60. Early to rise and early to bed makes a male healthy and wealthy and dead.

61. Some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in the daytime or when both were sober.

62. Man seeks to escape himself in myth, and does so by any means at his disposal. Drugs, alcohol, or lies. Unable to withdraw into himself, he disguises himself. Lies and inaccuracy give him a few moments of comfort.

63. There is always a period when a man with a beard shaves it off. This period does not last. He returns headlong to his beard.

64. There is an invisible garment woven around us from our earliest years; it is made of the way we eat, the way we walk, the way we greet people...

65. Ainsi que la vertu, le crime a ses degres; Et jamais on n'a vu la timide innocence Passer subitement a l'extreme licence.

66. Fill it up. I take as large draughts of liquor as I did of love. I hate a flincher in either.

67. I could see things turning into a nasty tailspin. And then I thought, Maybe I'm slow, but this is ridiculous. Fuck it, just stop! So I stopped everything for the better part of a year. I guess I just reached a point where I said, 'Jesus Christ, what am I doing? Life is fucking good. What am I doing to myself?' Now I drink a glass or two of red wine and that's it. (2004)

68. I cut down [on smoking], I'll have you know. I cut down drastically. After all these years, I've finally figured it out. It's really pointless. (2004)

69. To keep your character intact you cannot stoop to filthy acts. It makes it easier to stoop the next time.

70. Without discipline, there's no life at all.

71. If you're going to stop masturbating, you can't 'taper off.' You've got to quit, cold jerky!

72. I do all my best work in bed.

73. I generally avoid temptation unless I can't resist it.

74. Once conform, once do what others do because they do it, and a kind of lethargy steals over all the finer senses of the soul.

75. I've had every known chemical--cocaine, booze--and tobacco is the hardest one in the world for me to quit. You watch old flicks? It's suggestion by looking at something: You see a cigarette, and it makes you want to smoke!

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

77. I don't ask writers about their work habits. I really don't care. Joyce Carol Oates says somewhere that when writers ask each other what time they start working and when they finish and how much time they take for lunch, they're actually trying to find out, 'Is he as crazy as I am?' I don't need that question answered.

78. Early rising may not be a vice : but it is certainly no virtue. The old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed.

79. Do you know what the Governor of South Carolina said to the Governor of North Carolina? It's a long time between drinks, observed that powerful thinker.

80. I ask for your indulgence when I march out quotations. This is the double syndrome of men who write for a living and men who are over forty. The young smoke pot - we inhale from our Bartlett's.

81. It takes a son of a bitch to change a habit.

82. YouTube is very addictive. I refused to put it on my favourite places because it's too easy to go there. [1]

83. Individual societies begin in harmonious adaptation to the environment and, like individuals, quickly get trapped into nonadaptive, artificial, repetitive sequences.

84. Lever a six, coucher a dix, Diner a dix, souper a six, Font vivre l'homme dix fois dix.

85. Lines slip easily down the accustomed grooves. The old designs are copied so glibly that we are half inclined to think them original, save for that very glibness.

86. A dog returning to his vomit