Habit Quotes - Page 9

• To things which you bear with impatience you should accustom yourself, and, by habit you will bear them well.

  Seneca the Younger

  Bears, Impatience, Should

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• My untidy habits drive me to follow the slash-and-burn principle. Work on a virgin table until the mess becomes unbearable, then move on to a clean table in a clean room - or, on a beautiful summer day like this, one of the five tables dotted around the garden. Trash that table and move on again.

  Richard Dawkins

  Beautiful, Summer, Moving

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• We make our customs lightly; once made, like our sins, they grip us in bands of steel; we become the creatures of our creation.

  Charles W. Chesnutt

  Steel, Band, Sin

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• Things we do regularly become buried with habits, and we lose the ability to extract their powers to inspire.

  Sara Genn

  Inspire, Buried, Ability

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• And it is a singular truth that, though a man may shake off national habits, accent, manner of thinking, style of dress,--though he may become perfectly identified with another nation, and speak its language well, perhaps better than his own,--yet never can he succeed in changing his handwriting to a foreign style.

  Benjamin Disraeli

  Men, Thinking, Style

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• Vicious habits are so great a stain to human nature, and so odious in themselves, that every person actuated by right reason would avoid them, though he were sure they would be always concealed both from God and man, and had no future punishment entailed upon them.

  Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Men, Would Be, Human Nature

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• Habit is overcome by habit.
  [Lat., Consuetudo consuetudine vincitur.]

  Thomas a Kempis

  Overcoming

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• Are we not like the actor of old times, who wore his mask so long his face took its likeness?

  Letitia Elizabeth Landon

  Long, Actors, Faces

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• Habit is necessary to give power.

  William Hazlitt

  Giving

  William Hazlitt (1870). “The Plain Speaker: Opinions on Books, Men, and Things”, p.432

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• The chain of habit coils itself around the heart like a serpent, to gnaw and stifle it.

  William Hazlitt

  Heart, Chains, Serpent

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• Habit and imitation--there is nothing more perennial in us than these two. They are the source of all working, and all apprenticeship, of all practice, and all learning, in this world.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Practice, Two, World

  Thomas Carlyle (1862). “Past and Present: Chartism, and Sartor Resartus”, p.126

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• Habit is stronger than nature.
  [Lat., Consuetudo natura potentior est.]

  Quintus Curtius Rufus

  Stronger

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• Habit is overcome by habit.

  Thomas a Kempis

  Overcoming

  Thomas a Kempis, Aeterna Press (1941*). “The Following of Christ”, p.78, Aeterna Press

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• We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is a habit.

  Socrates

  Excellence

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• 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.

  Thomas Troward

  Wish, Essentials, Clarity

  Thomas Troward (1915). “The Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science”

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• The moment love is equated with happiness, it is satisfied — and is no longer love. The satisfied, the happy ones, do not love; they fall asleep in habit, near neighbor to annihilation.

  Miguel de Unamuno

  Fall, Have A Great Day, Neighbor

  "The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations".

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• Habit is second nature.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Nature

  "Bartlett's Familiar Quotations" by John Bartlett, 10th ed., 1919.

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• Powerful indeed is the empire of habit.

  Publilius Syrus

  Powerful, Empires

  "The Moral Sayings of Publius Syrus, a Roman Slave". Book by Darius Lyman. Maxim 305, 1856.

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• Habit is stronger than nature.

  Quintus Curtius Rufus

  Stronger

  "Historiarum Alexandri Magni Macedonis Libri Qui Supersunt". Book V, 5, 21,

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• A man may have no bad habits and have worse

  Mark Twain

  Men, May, Bad Habits

  Mark Twain (2015). “Bite-Size Twain: Wit and Wisdom from the Literary Legend”, p.83, St. Martin's Press

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• A habit does not a monk make.

  Francois Rabelais

  Doe, Monk

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• To exist is a habit I do not despair of acquiring.

  Emile M. Cioran

  Despair

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• Habit, to which all of us are more or less slaves.

  Jean de La Fontaine

  Slave

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• All habits gather by unseen degrees.

  John Dryden

  Unseen, Degrees

  "Wit for Wisdom". Book by Kevin Solway, www.theabsolute.net.

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• Centres, or centre-pieces of wood, are put by builders under an arch of stone while it is in the process of construction till the keystone is put in. Just such is the use Satan makes of pleasures to construct evil habits upon; the pleasure lasts till the habit is fully formed; but that done the habit may stand eternal. The pleasures are sent for firewood, and the hell begins in this life.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Evil, Arches, May

  "Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers". Book by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, p. 295, 1895.

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