Habitual Quotes - Page 3

• When you’re living by default, you’re automatically reacting to life in habitual ways, many of which may be limiting you and your life. In contrast, living deliberately means making more conscious and constructive life choices. When you’re living deliberately, you’re living from a position of responsibility; you’re making choices with greater awareness. You’re taken yourself off autopilot, so you’re better prepared to align your actions with the results you want to achieve.

  Lauren Mackler

  Taken, Mean, Responsibility

  12 Copy quote

• Magic is a sudden opening of the mind to the wonder of existence. It is a sense that there is much more to life than we usually recognize; that we do not have to be confined by the limited views that our family, our society, or our own habitual thoughts impose on us; that life contains many dimensions, depths, textures, and meanings extending far beyond our familiar beliefs and concepts.

  John Welwood

  Views, Mind, Magic

  35 Copy quote

• 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. It is the practice of sacrificing to those whom we meet in society, all the little inconveniences and preferences which will gratify them, and deprive us of nothing worth a moment's consideration; it is the giving a pleasing and flattering turn to our expressions, which will conciliate others, and make them pleased with us as well as themselves. How cheap a price for the good will of another!

  Thomas Jefferson

  Real, Sacrifice, Expression

  5 Copy quote

• There should be asylums for habitual teetotalers, but they would probably relapse into teetotalism as soon as they got out.

  Samuel Butler

  Drinking, Asylums, Teetotalers

  6 Copy quote

• In vain are Schools, Academies, and Universities instituted, if loose Principles and licentious habits are impressed upon Children in their earliest years . . . . The Vices and Examples of the Parents cannot be concealed from the Children. How is it possible that Children can have any just Sense of the sacred Obligations of Morality or Religion if, from their earliest Infancy, they learn their Mothers live in habitual Infidelity to their fathers, and their fathers in as constant Infidelity to their Mothers.

  John Adams

  Education, Mother, Children

  John Adams (2004). “The Portable John Adams”, p.75, Penguin

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Any 'Christians' who take for themselves any more than the plain necessaries of life, live in an open habitual denial of the Lord. They have gained riches and hell-fire.

  John Wesley

  Christian, Simple, Fire

  11 Copy quote

• Nothing is more graceful than habitual cheerfulness.

  Adam Smith

  Happiness, Cheerfulness

  Adam Smith (2012). “The Theory of Moral Sentiments”, p.39, Courier Corporation

  68 Copy quote

  Show source

• Dialogue is a space where we may see the assumptions which lay beneath the surface of our thoughts, assumptions which drive us, assumptions around which we build organizations, create economies, form nations and religions. These assumptions become habitual, mental habits that drive us, confuse us and prevent our responding intelligently to the challenges we face every day.

  David Bohm

  Organization, Space, Empathy

  16 Copy quote

• Visualizing, creative mental picturing, is no more difficult than what you do when you remember some scene out of the past, or worry about the future. Acting out new action patterns is no more difficult than deciding, then following through on tying your shoes in a new and different manner each morning, instead of continuing to tie them in your old habitual way, without thought or decision.

  Maxwell Maltz

  Morning, Past, Shoes

  Maxwell Maltz (2016). “Psycho-Cybernetics Deluxe Edition: The Original Text of the Classic Guide to a New Life”, p.19, Penguin

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• ...the habitual dualist's solution to the problem of dualism: to solve the dilemma by chopping off one of the horns.

  Alan Watts

  Problem, Chopping, Horns

  Alan Watts (1973). “This is It, and Other Essays on Zen and Spiritual Experience”, Vintage

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• Your doubts are not the product of accurate thinking, but habitual thinking. Years ago you excepted flawed conclusions as correct, begin to live your life as if those warped ideas about your potential were true, and ceased the bold experiment in living that brought you many breakthrough behaviors as a child.

  Price Pritchett

  Children, Thinking, Years

  Pritchett, Price (1990). “You2: a high-velocity formula for multiplying your personal effectiveness in quantum leaps”, Pritchett & Associates

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• I cannot favour laws such as that of Idaho, which allows sterilization of 'mental defectives, epileptics, habitual criminals, moral degenerates, and sex perverts.' The last two categories here are very vague . . . The law of Idaho would have justified the sterilization of Socrates, Plato, Julius Caesar, and St. Paul.

  Bertrand Russell

  Sex, Plato, Law

  Bertrand Russell (2009). “Bertrand Russell's Best”, p.102, Routledge

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• It's a matter of ABC: When we encounter ADVERSITY, we react by thinking about it. Our thoughts rapidly congeal into BELIEFS. These beliefs may become so habitual we don't even realize we have them unless we stop to focus on them. And they don't just sit there idly; they have CONSEQUENCES.

  Martin Seligman

  Adversity, Thinking, Focus

  66 Copy quote

• Our minds were circumscribed within narrow limits by an habitual belief that it was our duty to be subordinate to the mother country.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Country, Mother, Mind

  Thomas Jefferson (2012). “Autobiography of Thomas Jefferson”, p.5, Simon and Schuster

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Fame, power, and gold, are loved for their own sakes - are worshipped with a blind, habitual idolatry.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Gold, Sake, Blind

  Percy Bysshe Shelley (1980). “Shelley on Love: An Anthology”, p.83, Univ of California Press

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• Even happiness itself may become habitual. There is a habit of looking at the bright side of things, and also of looking at the dark side. Dr. Johnson has said that the habit of looking at the best side of a thing is worth more to a man than a thousand pounds a year. And we possess the power, to a great extent, of so exercising the will as to direct the thoughts upon objects calculated to yield happiness and improvement rather than their opposites.

  Samuel Smiles

  Exercise, Dark, Men

  Samuel Smiles (1868). “Self-Help; with Illustrations of Character, Conduct, and Perseverance by Samuel Smiles”, p.391

  21 Copy quote

  Show source

• The most shocking act, closely examined, is just a louder version of some habitual gesture.

  Susan Choi

  Gestures, Shocking, Versions

  Susan Choi (2014). “American Woman: A Novel”, p.4, Harper Collins

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The mind has powers that allow us to go beyond our normal or habitual way of being, and beyond what we think is possible.

  Joseph Jaworski

  Thinking, Mind, Way

  Joseph Jaworski (2011). “Synchronicity: The Inner Path of Leadership”, p.82, Berrett-Koehler Publishers

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• I certainly wouldn't advocate anyone using drugs on a regular or habitual basis.

  William S. Burroughs

  Drug, Bases

  Source: www.stopsmilingonline.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I have full faith in people. I think that we have the ability to change. We're habitual creatures. Once we figure out that bad habit and identify it, whether it's behavioral or whatever it may be, we change our habits. Obviously, I'm simplifying it and making it sound very easy to do, and we all know it's very difficult, but it's doable.

  Eva Mendes

  Thinking, People, Sound

  Source: collider.com

  15 Copy quote

  Show source

• I always write the same way. I always write with a yellow pad and a ballpoint pen on my bed. And then I go and type it up afterwards. I've always done that. Those things become habitual.

  Woody Allen

  Writing, Yellow, Bed

  4 Copy quote

• It cannot but be injurious to the human mind never to be called into effort: the habit of receiving pleasure without any exertion of thought, by the mere excitement of curiosity, and sensibility, may be justly ranked among the worst effects of habitual novel-reading.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Reading, Effort, Curiosity

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1849). “The works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge”, p.369

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• It is worth repeating that powerful imagination is not false outward vision, but intense inward representation, and a creative energy constantly fed by susceptibility to the veriest minutiæ of experience, which it reproduces and constructs in fresh and fresh wholes; not the habitual confusion of provable fact with the fictions of fancy and transient inclination, but a breadth of ideal association which informs every material object, every incidental fact with far-reaching memories and storied residues of passion, bringing into new light the less obvious relations to human existence.

  George Eliot

  Memories, Powerful, Passion

  4 Copy quote

• For that which has become habitual, becomes as it were natural.

  Aristotle

  Natural

  Rhetorica,1370a (translated by J H Freese).

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• The most refined abstractions of logic conduct to a view of life, which, though startling to the apprehension, is, in fact, that which the habitual sense of its repeated combinations has extinguished in us. It strips, as it were, the painted curtain from this scene of things. I confess that I am one of those who are unable to refuse my assent to the conclusions of those philosophers who assert that nothing exists but as it is perceived.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Life, Views, Facts

  Percy Bysshe Shelley (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Illustrated)”, p.1820, Delphi Classics

  4 Copy quote

  Show source