Habit Quotes - Page 40

• There is surely no contradiction in saying that a certain section of the community may be quite competent to protect the persons and property of the rest, yet quite unfit to direct our opinions, or to superintend our private habits.

  Thomas B. Macaulay

  Government, Community, Liberty

  "Southey's Colloquies on Society". Book by Thomas B. Macaulay, 1830.

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• When habit has strengthened our sense of duties, they leave us no time for other things; but when young we neglect them and this gives us time for anything.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Giving, Neglect, Young

  Thomas Jefferson, Richard Holland Johnston, Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association of the United States (1903). “The writings of Thomas Jefferson”

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• Conversation is a meeting of minds with different memories and habits. When minds meet, they don't just exchange facts: they transform them, reshape them, draw different implications from them, engage in new trains of thought. Conversation doesn't just reshuffle the cards: it creates new cards.

  Theodore Zeldin

  Memories, Learning, Knowledge

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• Your clothes smell heavily of clothing. Your den is filled with low-hanging palls of fresh air. The only rattle in your car is the sound of toll change in the ashtray. The absence of telltale tobacco stains on your shirt collar tells the tale - you've licked the smoking habit.

  Robert Breault

  Air, Smell, Clothes

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• If an addict who has been completely cured starts smoking again he no longer experiences the discomfort of his first addiction. There exists, therefore, outside alkaloids and habit, a sense for opium, an intangible habit which lives on, despite the recasting of the organism. The dead drug leaves a ghost behind. At certain hours it haunts the house.

  Jean Cocteau

  Addiction, House, Smoking

  Jean Cocteau, Margaret Crosland (1972). “Cocteau's world: an anthology of writings”, Owen

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• Those who are in the power of evil habits must conquer them as they can; and conquered they must be, or neither wisdom nor happiness can be attained: but those who are not yet subject to their influence may, by timely caution, preserve their freedom.

  Samuel Johnson

  Evil, May, Influence

  Samuel Johnson (1848). “The Wisdom of the Rambler, Adventurer, and Idler”, p.140

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• Man like every other animal is by nature indolent. If nothing spurs him on, then he will hardly think, and will behave from habit like an automaton.

  Albert Einstein

  Animal, Men, Thinking

  Albert Einstein (2016). “The Albert Einstein Collection: Essays in Humanism, The Theory of Relativity, and The World As I See It”, p.24, Open Road Media

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• If you were to fault yourself in one of three areas, which would it be: (1) the inability to prioritize; (2) the inability or desire to organize around those priorities; or (3) the lack of discipline to execute around them? ... Most people say their main fault is a lack of discipline. On deeper thought, I believe that is not the case. The basic problem is that their priorities have not become deeply planted in their hearts and minds. They haven't really internalized Habit 2 [Begin with the end in mind].

  Stephen Covey

  Inspirational, Believe, Heart

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• The masses have no habit of self-reliance or original action.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Self, Action, Mass

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• Every time I would open my mouth to sing, everybody was paying attention to me. It became a habit.

  Nana Mouskouri

  Attention, Mouths, Pay Attention

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• You realize just how long youve been away when you get home and start dialing 8 out of habit so you can get access to local calls.

  Tom Berenger

  Home, Long, Realizing

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• I will form good habits and become their slaves.

  Og Mandino

  Slave, Form, Good Habits

  Og Mandino (2009). “The Greatest Secret in the World”, p.11, Bantam

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• It is not the organs-that is, the character and form of the animal's bodily parts-that have given rise to its habits and particular structures. It is the habits and manner of life and the conditions in which its ancestors lived that have in the course of time fashioned its bodily form, its organs and qualities.

  Jean-Baptiste Lamarck

  Character, Animal, Quality

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• [Theodore Roosevelt] was a naturalist on the broadest grounds, uniting much technical knowledge with knowledge of the daily lives and habits of all forms of wild life. He probably knew tenfold more natural history than all the presidents who had preceded him, and, I think one is safe in saying, more human history also.

  John Burroughs

  Knowledge, Science, Thinking

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• The classification of facts, the recognition of their sequence and relative significance is the function of science, and the habit of forming a judgment upon these facts unbiassed by personal feeling is characteristic of what may be termed the scientific frame of mind.

  Karl Pearson

  Science, Feelings, Mind

  Karl Pearson (2007). “The Grammar of Science”, p.6, Cosimo, Inc.

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• When the aggregate amount of solid matter transported by rivers in a given number of centuries from a large continent, shall be reduced to arithmetical computation, the result will appear most astonishing to those...not in the habit of reflecting how many of the mightiest of operations in nature are effected insensibly, without noise or disorder.

  Charles Lyell

  Science, Rivers, Numbers

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• [John] Dalton was a man of regular habits. For fifty-seven years he walked out of Manchester every day; he measured the rainfall, the temperature-a singularly monotonous enterprise in this climate. Of all that mass of data, nothing whatever came. But of the one searching, almost childlike question about the weights that enter the construction of these simple molecules-out of that came modern atomic theory. That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to the pertinent answer.

  Jacob Bronowski

  Science, Simple, Men

  Ascent of Man (1973) ch. 4

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• Without theory, practice is but routine born of habit. Theory alone can bring forth and develop the spirit of invention. ... [Do not] share the opinion of those narrow minds who disdain everything in science which has not an immediate application. ... A theoretical discovery has but the merit of its existence: it awakens hope, and that is all. But let it be cultivated, let it grow, and you will see what it will become.

  Louis Pasteur

  Science, Discovery, Practice

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• The future of our civilisation depends upon the widening spread and deepening hold of the scientific habit of mind.

  John Dewey

  Future, Science, Mind

  John Dewey (1978). “The Middle Works, 1899-1924”, p.78, SIU Press

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• Of these austerer virtues the love of truth is the chief, and in mathematics, more than elsewhere, the love of truth may find encouragement for waning faith. Every great study is not only an end in itself, but also a means of creating and sustaining a lofty habit of mind; and this purpose should be kept always in view throughout the teaching and learning of mathematics.

  Bertrand Russell

  Encouragement, Truth, Teaching

  Bertrand Russell (2015). “Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays: Top Philosophy Collections”, p.45, 谷月社

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• During the time that [Karl] Landsteiner gave me an education in the field of imununology, I discovered that he and I were thinking about the serologic problem in very different ways. He would ask, What do these experiments force us to believe about the nature of the world? I would ask, What is the most. simple and general picture of the world that we can formulate that is not ruled by these experiments? I realized that medical and biological investigators were not attacking their problems the same way that theoretical physicists do, the way I had been in the habit of doing.

  Linus Pauling

  Nature, Believe, Science

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• Nature does nothing without a purpose. In children may be observed the traces and seeds of what will one day be settled psychological habits, though psychologically a child hardly differs for the time being from an animal.

  Aristotle

  Nature, Children, Science

  Historia Animalium VIII.I (transl. D. W. Thompson)

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• We have a habit in writing articles published in scientific journals to make the work as finished as possible, to cover up all the tracks, to not worry about the blind alleys or describe how you had the wrong idea first, and so on. So there isn't any place to publish, in a dignified manner, what you actually did in order to get to do the work, although, there has been in these days, some interest in this kind of thing.

  Richard P. Feynman

  Funny, Work, Writing

  "The Development of the Space-Time View of Quantum Electrodynamics". Richard P. Feynman's Nobel lecture, www.nobelprize.org. December 11, 1965.

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• War both needs and generates certain virtues; not the highest, but what may be called the preliminary virtues, as valor, veracity, the spirit of obedience, the habit of discipline. Any of these, and of others like them, when possessed by a nation, and no matter how generated, will give them a military advantage, and make them more likely to stay in the race of nations.

  Walter Bagehot

  Military, War, Race

  Walter Bagehot (1999). “Physics and Politics, Or, Thoughts on the Application of the Principles of "natural Selection" and "inheritance" to Political Society”, Ivan R Dee

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• Upon this subject, the habits of our whole species fall into three great classes--useful labour, useless labour and idleness. Of these the first only is meritorious; and to it all the products of labour rightfully belong; but the two latter, while they exist, are heavy pensioners upon the first, robbing it of a large portion of it's just rights. The only remedy for this is to, as far as possible, drive useless labour and idleness out of existence.

  Abraham Lincoln

  Work, Fall, Class

  Abraham Lincoln (2008). “The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln”, p.412, Wildside Press LLC

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