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Word Gems 

exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity

Habit

“Wise living consists perhaps less in acquiring good habits than in acquiring as few habits as possible.” Eric Hoffer

Editor's 1-Minute Essay: Habit

Goethe: “The phrases that men hear or repeat continually, end by becoming convictions and ossify the organs of intelligence.”

Aristotle: “It is well to be up before daybreak, for such habits contribute to health, wealth, and wisdom.”

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

J. Paul Getty: “The individual who wants to reach the top in business must appreciate the might of the force of habit and must understand that practices are what create habits. He must be quick to break those habits that can break him and hasten to adopt those practices that will become the habits that help him achieve the success he desires.”

Ambrose Bierce: “Habit is a shackle for the free.”

Blaise Pascal: “Habit is a second nature that destroys the first. But what is nature? Why is habit not natural? I am very much afraid that nature itself is only a first habit, just as habit is a second nature.”

Eric Hoffer: “Wise living consists perhaps less in acquiring good habits than in acquiring as few habits as possible.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg: “One might call habit a moral friction: something that prevents the mind from gliding over things but connects it with them and makes it hard for it to free itself from them.”

Thomas Troward: “Our repeated failure to fully act as we would wish must not discourage us. It is the sincere intention that is the essential thing, and this will in time release us from the bondage of habits which at present seem almost insuperable.”

Samuel Beckett: “Habit is a great deadener.”

Blaise Pascal: “Habit is the second nature which destroys the first.”

Adlai Stevenson: “Laws are never as effective as habits.”

Virginia Woolf: “Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.”

John Locke: “Practice conquers the habit of doing, without reflecting on the rule.”

Vince Lombardi: “Once you learn to quit, it becomes a habit.”

Samuel Johnson: “The chains of habit are generally too weak to be felt, until they are too strong to be broken.”

Albert Einstein: “Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.”

Mark Twain: “Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits.”

Elbert Hubbard: “Cultivate only the habits that you are willing should master you.”

Unknown: “Good habits are formed; bad habits we fall into.”

Orison Swett Marden: “Man becomes a slave to his constantly repeated acts. What he at first chooses, at last compels.”

Miguel de Unamuno: “To fall into a habit is to begin to cease to be.”

Carlos Santana: “Most people don't have that willingness to break bad habits. They have a lot of excuses and they talk like victims.”

William James: “Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state.”

Ralph W. Sockman: “Good habits, which bring our lower passions and appetites under automatic control, leave our natures free to explore the larger experiences of life. Too many of us divide and dissipate our energies in debating actions which should be taken for granted.”

Maxwell Maltz: “To change a habit, make a conscious decision, then act out the new behavior.”

William James: “We must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can.”

Aristotle: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”