Habit Quotes - Page 37

• Language is political. That's why you and me, my Brother and Sister, that's why we supposed to choke our natural self into the weird, lying, barbarous, unreal, white speech and writing habits that the schools lay down like holy law.

  June Jordan

  Brother, Lying, Writing

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• To quit between tee and green is more habit-forming than drinking a highball before breakfast.

  Sam Snead

  Drinking, Golf, Breakfast

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• The features of our face are hardly more than gestures which force of habit made permanent. Nature, like the destruction of Pompeii, like the metamorphosis of a nymph into a tree, has arrested us in an accustomed movement.

  Marcel Proust

  Nature, Nymphs, Tree

  Marcel Proust (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Marcel Proust (Illustrated)”, p.1194, Delphi Classics

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• As one gets older being sad and miserable can become a bit of a habit. To counteract this, she suggests making a point of savoring such things as the tastiness of a piece of fruit, or other small things we might have been prone to overlook during our younger, busier days.

  Rumer Godden

  Being Sad, Age, Pieces

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• The habit of looking for beauty in everything makes us notice the shortcomings of things, our sense, hungry for complete satisfaction, misses the perfection it demands.

  George Santayana

  Beauty, Perfection, Missing

  George Santayana (2012). “The Sense of Beauty”, p.77, Courier Corporation

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• Thus strength is afforded by good and thorough customs, thus is learnt the subjection of the individual, and strenuousness of character becomes a birth gift and afterwards is fostered as a habit.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Character, Personality, Birth

  Friedrich Nietzsche (2012). “Human, All-Too-Human: Parts One and Two”, p.122, Courier Corporation

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• There should be a dash of the amateur in criticism. For the amateur is a man of enthusiasm who has not settled down and is not habit bound.

  Brooks Atkinson

  Men, Criticism, Down And

  Brooks Atkinson (1951). “Once around the sun”

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• We become aware, however, that all customs, even the hardest, grow pleasanter and milder with time, and that the severest way of life may become a habit and therefore a pleasure.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  May, Way, Tradition

  Friedrich Nietzsche (2012). “Human, All-Too-Human: Parts One and Two”, p.61, Courier Corporation

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• How do cultures differ from one another? Above all, in their customs. Tell me how you dress, how you act, what are your habits, which gods you honor, and I will tell you who you are. Man not only creates culture, he carries it around with him. Man is culture.

  Ryszard Kapuscinski

  Men, Honor, Dresses

  Ryszard Kapuscinski (2009). “Travels with Herodotus”, p.80, Vintage

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• Habit is not mere subjugation, it is a tender tie; when one remembers habit it seems to have been happiness.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Ties, Remember, Tradition

  Elizabeth Bowen (1938). “The death of the heart”, Viking Pr

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• An important species of pleasure, and therewith the source of morality, arises out of habit.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Important, Ethics, Morality

  Friedrich Nietzsche (2012). “Human, All-Too-Human: Parts One and Two”, p.61, Courier Corporation

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• The habit of pleasing by flattery makes a language soft; the fear of offending by truth makes it circuitous and conventional.

  Walter Savage Landor

  Offending, Flattery, Language

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• The fundamental trouble with marriage is that it shakes a man's confidence in himself, and so greatly diminishes his general competence and effectiveness. His habit of mind becomes that of a commander who has lost a decisive and calamitous battle. He quite trusts himself thereafter.

  H. L. Mencken

  Marriage, Wedding, Men

  H. L. Mencken, Marion Elizabeth Rodgers (2010). “H.L. Mencken: Prejudices: First, Second, and Third Series”, Hubsta Ltd

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• We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. Aristotle How very little can be done under the spirit of fear.

  Florence Nightingale

  Smart, Excellence, Littles

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• Well aware that the opinions and belief of men depend not on their own will, but follow involuntarily the evidence proposed to their minds; that Almighty God hath created the mind free, and manifested his supreme will that free it shall remain by making it altogether insusceptible of restraint; that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments, or burthens, or by civil incapacitations, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and are a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Religious, Men, Hypocrisy

  Thomas Jefferson (2011). “Jefferson on Freedom: Wisdom, Advice, and Hints on Freedom, Democracy, and the American Way”, p.34, Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.

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• In great cities men are more callous both to the happiness and the misery of others, than in the country; for they are constantly in the habit of seeing both extremes.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Country, Sadness, Men

  Charles Caleb Colton (1836). “Lacon: Or, Many Things in Few Words, Addressed to Those who Think”, p.356

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• I have always preferred cheerfulness to mirth. The latter I consider as an act, the former as a habit of mind. Mirth is short and transient, cheerfulness fixed and permanent.

  Joseph Addison

  Optimism, Mind, Mirth

  Joseph Addison (1839). “Essays, Moral and Humorous: Also Essays on Imagination and Taste”, p.103

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• Men submit from habit to everything that seeks power.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Power, Men, Submit

  Friedrich Nietzsche (2012). “Human, All-Too-Human: Parts One and Two”, p.139, Courier Corporation

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• He found a formula for drawing comic rabbits:
  This formula for drawing comic rabbits paid.
  Till in the end he could not change the tragic habits
  This formula for drawing comic rabbits made.

  Robert Graves

  Philosophy, Drawing, Rabbits

  Robert Graves, Lucia Graves (1995). “Complete short stories”, Carcanet Press Ltd.

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• Philosophers are in the habit of setting themselves before life and experience.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Philosophy, Philosopher, Settings

  Friedrich Nietzsche (2012). “Human, All-Too-Human: Parts One and Two”, p.23, Courier Corporation

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• One will seldom go wrong if one attributes extreme actions to vanity, average ones to habit, and pretty ones to fear.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Fear, Vanity, Average

  Friedrich Nietzsche (2012). “Human, All-Too-Human: Parts One and Two”, p.54, Courier Corporation

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• Thought itself needs words. It runs on them like a long wire. And if it loses the habit of words, little by little it becomes shapeless, somber.

  Ugo Betti

  Running, Ideas, Long

  Ugo Betti (1968). “Three Plays”

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• Ideology is not the product of thought; it is the habit or the ritual of showing respect for certain formulas to which, for various reasons having to do with emotional safety, we have very strong ties of whose meaning and consequences in actuality we have no clear understanding.

  Lionel Trilling

  Strong, Emotional, Ideas

  Lionel Trilling (2012). “The Liberal Imagination”, p.286, New York Review of Books

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• War may be an armed angel with a mission, but she has the personal habits of the slums.

  Rebecca Harding Davis

  War, Angel, May

  Rebecca Harding Davis (1904). “Rebecca Harding Davis: Writing Cultural Autobiography”, p.15, Vanderbilt University Press

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• One of my timesaving habits is to save all of my magazines and junk mail for airplane trips. I walk on the plane with a very heavy bundle, but by the time the trip is over, it can all be thrown away.

  Renee Fleming

  Airplane, Junk, Magazines

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