Habitual Quotes - Page 6

• Our habitual experience is a complex of failure and success in the enterprise of interpretation. If we desire a record of uninterpreted experience, we must ask a stone to record its autobiography.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Desire, Records, Stones

  Alfred North Whitehead (2010). “Process and Reality”, p.15, Simon and Schuster

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• 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

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• 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

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• All birds during the pairing season become more or less sentimental, and murmur soft nothings in a tone very unlike the grinding-organ repetition and loudness of their habitual song. The crow is very comical as a lover; and to hear him trying to soften his croak to the proper Saint-Preux standard has something the effect of a Mississippi boatman quoting Tennyson.

  James Russell Lowell

  Song, Bird, Crow

  James Russell Lowell (2016). “Delphi Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell (Illustrated)”, p.1661, Delphi Classics

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• Habit is the enormous flywheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision. Full half the time of such a man goes to the deciding, or regretting, of matters which ought to be so ingrained in him as practically not to exist for his consciousness at all.

  William James

  Regret, Men, Agents

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• There are some tempers--how shall I describe them--formed either of such impenetrable matter, or wrought up by habitual selfishness to such an utter insensibility of what becomes of the fortunes of their fellow-creatures, as if they were not partakers of the same nature, or had no lot or connection at all with the species.

  Laurence Sterne

  Selfishness, Connections, Matter

  Laurence Sterne (1873). “The Works of Laurence Sterne ...: With a Life of the Author”, p.26, London : Bickers, H. Sotheran

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• There is nothing more effectual in showing us the weakness of any habitual fallacy or assumption than to hear it sympathetically through the ears, as it were, of a skeptic.

  Margaret Oliphant

  Weakness, Ears, Assumption

  Margaret Oliphant (1876). “Phoebe, Junior0: A Last Chronicle of Carlingford : in Two Volumes”, p.40

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• Unless we believe that God renews creation every day, our prayers grow habitual and tedious.

  Baal Shem Tov

  Prayer, Believe, Creation

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• Of cases where a man is truthful both in speech and conduct when no considerations of honesty come in, from an habitual sincerity of disposition. Such sincerity may be esteemed a moral excellence; for the lover of truth, who is truthful even when nothing depends on it, will a fortiori be truthful when some interest is at stake, since having all along avoided falsehood for its own sake, he will assuredly avoid it when it is morally base; and this is a disposition that we praise.

  Aristotle

  Honesty, Men, Excellence

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• The political and social processes by which the Western European societies were put in order are not very apparent, have been forgotten, or have become habitual. They are part of our most familiar landscape, and we don't perceive them anymore. But most of them once scandalized people.

  Michel Foucault

  Order, People, Political

  Source: www.nicklewis.org

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• Ordinarily we are swept away by habitual momentum and don't interrupt our patterns slightly. When we feel betrayed or disappointed, does it occur to us to practice?

  Pema Chodron

  Karma, Practice, Doe

  Pema Chodron (2002). “The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times”, p.44, Shambhala Publications

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• Shamanic healing is a journey. It involves stepping out of our habitual roles, our conventional scripts, and improvising a dancing path.

  Gabrielle Roth

  Wise, Healing, Journey

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• If a certain activity, such as painting, becomes the habitual mode of expression, it may follow that taking up the painting materials and beginning work with them will act suggestively and so presently evoke a flight into the higher state.

  Robert Henri

  Expression, May, Painting

  Robert Henri (2007). “The Art Spirit”, p.158, Basic Books

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• I do not know what the cat can have eaten. Usually I know exactly what the cat has eaten. Not only have I fed it to the cat, at the cat's insistence, but the cat has thrown it up on the rug, and someone has tracked it all over onto the other rug. I do not know why cats are such habitual vomiters. They do not seem to enjoy it, judging by the sounds they make while they are doing it. It's their nature. A dog is going to bark. A cat is going to vomit.

  Roy Blount, Jr.

  Dog, Nature, Cat

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• Never assume that habitual silence means ability in reserve.

  Geoffrey Madan

  Mean, Silence, Luck

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• 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.

  Samuel Smiles

  Gratitude, Dark, Sides

  Samuel Smiles (1859). “Self-help; with illustrations of character and conduct”, p.322

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• There is on the globe one single spot, the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy. It is New Orleans, through which the produce of three-eighths of our territory must pass to market, and from its fertility it will ere long yield more than half of our whole produce and contain more than half our inhabitants.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Yield, New Orleans, History

  Thomas Jefferson (1829). “Memoir, correspondence, and miscellanies from the papers of T. Jefferson”, p.492

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• This same habitual blindness to spiritual, substantive dimensions of every significant challenge continues to handicap Hollywood.

  Michael Medved

  Spiritual, Challenges, Hollywood

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• I have quitted all forms of devotion and set prayers but those to which my state obliges me. And I make it my business only to persevere in His holy presence, wherein I keep myself by a simple attention, and a general fond regard to GOD, which I may call an actual presence of GOD, or, to speak better, an habitual, silent, and secret conversation of the soul with GOD, which often causes me joys and raptures inwardly, and sometimes also outwardly, so great that I am forced to use means to moderate them, and prevent their appearance to others.

  Brother Lawrence

  Prayer, Mean, Simple

  Brother Lawrence (2012). “The Practice of the Presence of God and The Spiritual Maxims”, p.20, Courier Corporation

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• We take for granted that we need to take showers, clean our house, and wash our clothes. Yet the mind and its thoughts need cleansing and ordering as much as our bodies. While few of us would consider eating dinner on yesterday's dirty dishes, we think nothing of tackling our problems with yesterdays cluttered minds.... The purpose to any meditation technique is to move beyond the normal contents of our consciousness, empty your mind of its habitual chatter, and concentrate your attention for the purpose of experiencing a higher state

  Anodea Judith

  Dirty, Moving, Thinking

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• There is no such thing as character other than the habitual action, as Mr. Aristotle told us two thousand years ago.

  David Mamet

  Character, Years, Two

  David Mamet (1991). “On directing film”, Viking Pr

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• Each time you stay present with fear and uncertainty, you're letting go of a habitual way of finding security and comfort.

  Pema Chodron

  Letting Go, Comfort, Way

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• When you refrain from habitual thoughts and behavior, the uncomfortable feelings will still be there. They don’t magically disappear. Over the years, I’ve come to call resting with the discomfort “the detox period,” because when you don’t act on your habitual patterns, it’s like giving up an addiction. You’re left with the feelings you were trying to escape. The practice is to make a wholehearted relationship with that

  Pema Chodron

  Wisdom, Buddhist, Giving Up

  Pema Chodron (2012). “Living Beautifully: with Uncertainty and Change”, p.36, Shambhala Publications

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• We just have to have the courage to turn against our habitual lifestyle and engage in unconventional living.

  Christopher McCandless

  Unconventional, Lifestyle, Turns

  Letter to Russell Fritz (as known as Ron Franz), April 1992.

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• It is of great importance to set a resolution, not to be shaken, never to tell an untruth. There is no vice so mean, so pitiful, so contemptible; and he who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and a third time, till at length it becomes habitual.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Lying, Mean, Vices

  Thomas Jefferson, John Dewey (2008). “The Essential Jefferson”, p.81, Courier Corporation

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