Habitual Quotes

• Imagine your mind as a garden and thoughts as the seeds you plant. Habitual negative, unhealthy, self-critical thoughts produce the weeds and thistles of depression, discontent, and anxiety in the garden of your mind. Luckily, the opposite is also true. Consistently planting positive, healthy, constructive thoughts will yield a crop of beautiful feelings, such as gratitude, love, and joy.

  Sue Thoele

  Beautiful, Weed, Gratitude

  Sue Patton Thoele (2008). “The Mindful Woman: Gentle Practices for Restoring Calm, Finding Balance, and Opening Your Heart”, p.52, New Harbinger Publications

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• We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.

  Will Durant

  Inspirational, Life, Motivational

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• Mindless habitual behavior is the enemy of innovation.

  Rosabeth Moss Kanter

  Innovation, Enemy, Inquiry

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• Let what is irksome become habitual, no more will it trouble you.

  Ovid

  Routine, Trouble

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• The strength of a man's virtue should not be measured by his special exertions, but by his habitual acts.

  Blaise Pascal

  Inspirational, Strength, Wisdom

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• Friendship is a strong and habitual inclination in two persons to promote the good and happiness of one another.

  Eustace Budgell

  Friendship, Relationship, Strong

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

  William James

  Inspirational, Philosophical, Sadness

  Principles of Psychology (1890) vol. 1, ch. 4

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• Our destiny changes with our thought; we shall become what we wish to become, do what we wish to do, when our habitual thought corresponds with our desire.

  Orison Swett Marden

  Inspirational, Uplifting, Ambition

  Orison Swett Marden (2015). “ORISON SWETT MARDEN Premium Collection - Wisdom & Empowerment Series (18 Books in One Volume): Steps to Success and Power, How to Get What You Want, An Iron Will, Be Good to Yourself, Every Man A King, Keeping Fit, Prosperity – How to Attract It, Stepping-Stones To Fame And Fortune...”, p.2038, e-artnow

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• Life is the art of being well deceived, and to succeed, it must be habitual and uninterrupted.

  Oscar Wilde

  Art, Deceived Us, Succeed

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• There are as many kinds of beauty as there are habitual ways of seeking happiness.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Happiness, Beauty, Way

  Charles Baudelaire (1964). “Baudelaire as a literary critic”, Pennsylvania State Univ Pr

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• Life is the art of being well deceived; and in order that the deception may succeed it must be habitual and uninterrupted.

  William Hazlitt

  Life, Art, Order

  William Hazlitt (1817). “The Round Table: A Collection of Essays on Literature, Men and Manners”, p.36

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• Sport is the habitual and voluntary cultivation of intensive physical effort.

  Pierre de Coubertin

  Sports, Effort, Cultivation

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• The sad part is that all we're trying to do is not feel that underlying uneasiness. The sadder part is that we proceed in such a way that the uneasiness only gets worse. The message here is that the only way to ease our pain is to experience it fully. Learn to stay. Learn to stay with uneasiness, learn to stay with the tightening, learn to stay with the itch and urge of shenpa, so that the habitual chain reaction doesn't continue to rule our lives, and the patterns that we consider unhelpful don't keep getting stronger as the days and months and years go by.

  Pema Chodron

  Pain, Years, Trying

  Pema Chodron (2009). “Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears”, p.28, Shambhala Publications

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• Life is the art of being well deceived.

  William Hazlitt

  Art, Deceived Us, Deception

  William Hazlitt (1817). “The Round Table: A Collection of Essays on Literature, Men and Manners”, p.36

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• There is certainly no defence or water -proof garment against adverse fortune which is, on the whole, so effectual as an habitual sense of humor.

  Thomas Wentworth Higginson

  Laughter, Twilight, Humor

  "The New World and the New Book, an Address, Delivered Before the Nineteenth Century Club of New York City, Jan. 15, 1891".

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• In truth, politeness is artificial good humor, it covers the natural want of it, and ends by rendering habitual a substitute nearly equivalent to the real virtue.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Real, Humor, Want

  Thomas Jefferson (1977). “The Portable Thomas Jefferson”, p.407, Penguin

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• Many people live habitually as if the present moment were an obstacle that they need to overcome in order to get to the next moment, and imagine living your whole live like that. Always, this moment is not quite good enough because you need to get to the next one.

  Eckhart Tolle

  Order, People, Overcoming

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• ... indefinite visions of ambition are weak against the ease of doing what is habitual or beguilingly agreeable.

  George Eliot

  Ambition, Vision, Ease

  George Eliot (2006). “Middlemarch: Easyread Edition”, p.402, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• Where I come from, gettin visual is habitual...

  GZA

  Design, Visuals

  "Song: Reunited (Wu-Tang Forever)". March 30, 1998.

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• It seems difficult, sometimes, to believe that there was a time when sentiments now become habitual, sentiments that imply not only the original imperative of conduct, but the original metaphysic of living, were by no means altogether habitual.

  Lascelles Abercrombie

  Believe, Mean, Sometimes

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• God loved us, and to prove it to us became human in order to become our brother in the flesh. He became poor, the poorest of the poor, in order to be able to include us all as his brothers (and sisters). He became a little child in order to be like children, even born, children from the slums.
  God has loved us and has given us all that he is and has. The Father gave the Son, the Son gave his very self, the Holy Spirit became our habitual sanctifier.... How grateful I should be to this kind Savior!

  Peter Julian Eymard

  Brother, Children, Father

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• Bad luck is usually transmitted by close proximity to habitual sufferers.

  Irvine Welsh

  Luck, Proximity, Sufferers

  Irvine Welsh (1995). “The Acid House”, p.41, W. W. Norton & Company

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• It is the habitual, not the periodical thought that decides your destiny.

  Wallace D. Wattles

  Destiny, Your Destiny, Our Destiny

  Wallace D. Wattles (2013). “The Selected Teachings of Wallace D. Wattles”, p.166, Simon and Schuster

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• Everything is grounded in mystery. Everything is swimming, and the stable does not exist. Life is a series of guesses, and there is mystery in a match. The commonplace is the habitual, and the habitual is a mystery that has grown stale from sense-insistence. Life undulates; there is no such thing as a level; a straight line is a myth, and all directions are indirections.

  Benjamin De Casseres

  Eye, Swimming, Cells

  "Chameleon: Being a Book of My Selves".

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• Ordinarily we are swept away by habitual momentum. We don't interrupt our patterns even slightly. With practice, however, we learn to stay with a broken heart, with a nameless fear, with the desire for revenge. Sticking with uncertainty is how we learn to relax in the midst of chaos, how we learn to be cool when the ground beneath us suddenly disappears.

  Pema Chodron

  Revenge, Heart, Practice

  Pema Chodron (2003). “Comfortable with Uncertainty: 108 Teachings on Cultivating Fearlessness and Compassion”, p.8, Shambhala Publications

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