Pursuits become habits. [ Ovid ]
Habit is ten times nature. [ Wellington ]
The force of habit is great. [ Cicero ]
Habit is stronger than nature. [ Quintus Curtius Rufus ]
Nothing is stronger than habit. [ Ovid ]
Habit is the nursery of errors. [ Victor Hugo ]
Habit is necessary to give power. [ Hazlitt ]
The power of habit is very strong. [ Syrus ]
Beware of fixing habits in a child. [ Robert Hall ]
Small habits well pursued, betimes.
May reach the dignity of crimes. [ Hannah More ]
All habits gather by unseen degrees. [ Dryden ]
How use doth breed a habit in a man! [ William Shakespeare ]
Habit is, as it were, a second nature. [ Cicero ]
A holy habit cleanseth not a foul soul. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
It is not the habit that makes the monk. [ Proverb ]
Habit is the deepest law of human nature. [ Carlyle ]
Habit is the most imperious of all masters. [ Goethe ]
Ease leads to habit, as success to ease.
He lives by rule who lives himself to please. [ Crabbe ]
Habit is too arbitrary a master for my liking. [ Lavater ]
For use almost can change the stamp of nature. [ William Shakespeare ]
Habit, if not resisted, soon becomes necessity. [ St. Augustine ]
Our second mother, habit, is also a good mother. [ Auerbach ]
Our purses shall be proud, our garments poor:
For 'tis the mind that makes the body rich;
And as the sun breaks through the darkest clouds,
So honor peereth in the meanest habit. [ William Shakespeare ]
Habit, to which all of us are more or less slaves. [ La Fontaine ]
Till vice gets an habit, there is a remedy for it. [ Proverb ]
Love is the offspring of chance: its nurse is habit. [ La Rochefoucauld ]
So much depends on habit in the tender years of youth. [ Virgil ]
Habit gives endurance, and fatigue is the best nightcap. [ Kincaid ]
A large part of Christian virtue consists in right habits. [ Paley ]
I will be a slave to no habit; therefore farewell tobacco. [ Hosea Ballou ]
How many unjust and wicked things are done from mere habit. [ Terence ]
Habit, with its iron sinews, clasps and leads us day by day. [ Lamartine ]
Habit is the purgatory in which we suffer for our past sins. [ George Eliot ]
Lose the habit of hard labour with its manliness, and then,
Comes the wreck of all you hope for in the wreck of noble men. [ Dr. Walter Smith ]
Habit is altogether too arbitrary a master for me to submit to. [ Lavater ]
Impertinent and lavish talking is in itself a very vicious habit. [ Thomas à Kempis ]
Greatness of any kind has no greater foe than a habit of drinking. [ Walter Scott ]
An ugly woman in a rich habit set out with jewels nothing can become. [ Dryden ]
Practice must settle the habit of doing without reflecting on the rule. [ Locke ]
Unless the habit leads to happiness the best habit is to contract none. [ Zimmermann ]
It is almost as difficult to make a man unlearn his errors as his knowledge. [ Colton ]
Every base occupation makes one sharp in its practice and dull in every other. [ Sir P. Sidney ]
Ill habits gather by unseen degrees, - as brooks make rivers, rivers run to seas. [ Dryden ]
In the great majority of things habit is a greater plague than ever afflicted Egypt. [ John Foster ]
Habit is a cable. We weave a thread of it every day, and at last we cannot break it. [ Horace Mann ]
As the sun breaks through the darkest clouds, so honor peereth in the meanest habit. [ William Shakespeare ]
Youth changes its tastes by the warmth of its blood; age retains its tastes by habit. [ La Rochefoucauld ]
The chain of habit coils itself around the heart like a serpent, to gnaw and stifle it. [ Hazlitt ]
Habit with him was all the test of truth, It must be right: I've done it from my youth.
[ Crabbe ]
Habits are soon assumed; but when we strive to strip them off, 'tis being flayed alive. [ Cowper ]
Man yields to custom as he bows to fate, - in all things ruled, mind, body, and estate. [ Crabbe ]
It is easy to assume a habit; but when you try to cast it off, it will take skin and all. [ Henry Wheeler Shaw (pen name Josh Billings) ]
Nothing really pleasant or unpleasant subsists by nature, but all things become so by habit. [ Epictetus ]
Marriage should combat without respite or mercy that monster which devours everything, habit. [ Balzac ]
The chains of habit are generally too small to be felt till they are too strong to be broken. [ Johnson ]
Nature had made occupation a necessity; society makes it a duty; habit may make it a pleasure. [ Capelle ]
The habit of looking on the best side of every event is worth more than a thousand pounds a year. [ Johnson ]
Great is the power of habit: teaching us as it does to bear fatigue and to despise wounds and pain. [ Cicero ]
Resist beginnings: it is too late to employ medicine when the evil has grown strong by inveterate habit. [ Ovid ]
A single bad habit will mar an otherwise faultless character, as an ink-drop soileth the pure white page. [ H. Ballou ]
To learn new habits is everything, for it is to reach the substance of life. Life is but a tissue of habits. [ Amiel ]
Poetry has given me the habit of wishing to discover the good and the beautiful in all that meets and surrounds me. [ Coleridge ]
Long customs are not easily broken: he that attempts to change the course of his own life very often labors in vain. [ Johnson ]
O form! how oft dost thou with thy case, thy habit, wrench awe from fools, and tie the wiser souls to thy false seeming! [ William Shakespeare ]
Prudery is often immodestly modest; its habit is to multiply sentinels in proportion as the fortress is less threatened. [ G. D. Prentice ]
Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy, but not expressed in fancy; rich, not gaudy; for the apparel oft proclaims the man. [ William Shakespeare ]
Strength is natural, but grace is the growth of habit. This charming quality requires practice if it is to become lasting. [ Joubert ]
Sow a thought, reap an action; sow an action, reap a habit; sow a habit, reap a character; sow a character, reap a destiny. [ Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People ]
It is the habit of party in England to ask the alliance of a man of genius, but to follow the guidance of a man of character. [ Lord John Russell ]
O place! O form, how often dost thou with thy case, thy habit, wrench awe from fools, and tie the wiser souls to thy false seeming! [ William Shakespeare ]
Poetry has been to me its own exceeding great reward; it has given me the habit of wishing to discover the good and beautiful in all that meets and surrounds me. [ S. T. Coleridge ]
The law of the harvest is to reap more than you sow. Sow an act, and you reap a habit; sow a habit, and you reap a character; sow a character, and you reap a destiny. [ G. D. Boardman ]
It is curious how tyrannical the habit of reading is, and what shifts we make to escape thinking. There is no bore we dread being left alone with so much as our own minds. [ Lowell ]
If you hate your enemies, you will contract such a vicious habit of mind, as by degrees will break out upon those who are your friends, or those who are indifferent to you. [ Plutarch ]
Friendship, unlike love, which is weakened by fruition, grows up, thrives, and increases by enjoyment; and being of itself spiritual, the soul is reformed by the habit of it. [ Montaigne ]
As small letters hurt the sight, so do small matters him that is too much intent upon them; they vex and stir up anger, which begets an evil habit in him in reference to greater affairs. [ Plutarch ]
Nothing, in truth, has such a tendency to weaken not only the powers of invention, but the intellectual powers in general, as a habit of extensive and various reading without reflection. [ Dugald Stewart ]
Haste turns usually upon a matter of ten minutes too late, and may be avoided by a habit like that of Lord Nelson, to which he ascribed his success in life, of being ten minutes too early. [ Bovee ]
A very desperate habit; one that is rarely cured. Apology is only egotism wrong side out. Nine times out of ten, the first thing a man's companion knows of his shortcomings is from his apology. [ Holmes ]
We unconsciously imitate what pleases us, and insensibly approximate to the characters we most admire. In this way, a generous habit of thought and of action carries with it an incalculable influence. [ Bovee ]
As for drinking, I have no rule about that. When the others drink I like to help; otherwise I remain dry, by habit and preference. This dryness does not hurt me, but it could easily hurt you, because you are different. [ Mark Twain, Seventieth Birthday speech ]
The habit of exaggeration, like dram-drinking, becomes a slavish necessity, and they who practise it pass their lives in a kind of mental telescope, through whose magnifying medium they look upon themselves and everything around them. [ J. B. Owen ]
Negligence or Neglect? Negligence is a habit; neglect is an act. The following sentences illustrate the difference in the meaning of these words:
His negligence was the source of all his misfortunes,
By his neglect he lost the opportunity.
[ Pure English, Hackett And Girvin, 1884 ]
Now, my young friends to whom I am addressing myself, with reference to this habit of reading, I make bold to tell you that it is your pass to the greatest, the purest, and the most perfect pleasure that God has prepared for His creatures. [ Anthony Trollope ]
There is a gentle, but perfectly irresistible coercion in a habit of reading well directed, over the whole tenor of a man's character and conduct, which is not the less effectual because it works insensibly, and because it is really the last thing he dreams of. [ Sir John Herschel ]
It is quite deplorable to see how many rational creatures, or at least who are thought so, mistake suffering for sanctity, and think a sad face and a gloomy habit of mind propitious offerings to that Deity whose works are all light and lustre and harmony and loveliness. [ Lady Morgan ]
Parents fear the destruction of natural affection in their children. What is this natural principle so liable to decay? Habit is a second nature, which destroys the first. Why is not custom nature? I suspect that this nature itself is but a first custom, as custom is a second nature. [ Pascal ]
As in labor, the more one doth exercise, the more one is enabled to do, strength growing upon work; so, with the use of suffering, men's minds get the habit of suffering, and all fears and terrors are to them but as a summons to battle, whereof they know beforehand they shall come off victorious. [ Sir P. Sidney ]
The very greatest genius, after all, is not the greatest thing in the world, any more than the greatest city in the world is the country or the sky. It is the concentration of some of its greatest powers, but it is not the greatest diffusion of its might. It is not the habit of its success, the stability of its sereneness. [ Leigh Hunt ]
Vulgar habit people have nowadays of asking one, after one has given them an idea, whether one is serious or not. Nothing is serious except passion. The intellect is an instrument on which one plays, that is all. The only serious form of intellect is the British intellect. And on the British form of intellect the illiterates play the drum. [ Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance ]
I have mentioned mathematics as a way to settle in the mind a habit of reasoning closely, and in train; not that I think it necessary that all men should be deep mathematicians, but that having got the way of reasoning, which that study necessarily brings the mind to, they might be able to transfer it to other parts of knowledge, as they have occasion. [ J. Locke ]
The habit of reading is the only enjoyment I know in which there is no alloy. It lasts when all other pleasures fade. It will be there to support you when all other resources are gone. It will be present to you when the energies of your body have fallen away from you. It will last you until your death. It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live. [ Trollope ]
The habit of exaggeration in language should be guarded against; it misleads the credulous and offends the perceptive; it imposes on us the society of a balloon, when a moderately-sized skull would fill the place much better; it begets much evil in promising what it cannot perform, and we have often found the most glowing declarations of intended good services end in mere Irish vows. [ Eliza Cook ]
The habit of committing our thoughts to writing is a powerful means of expanding the mind, and producing a logical and systematic arrangement of our views and opinions. It is this which gives the writer a vast superiority, as to the accuracy and extent of his conceptions, over the mere talker. No one can ever hope to know the principles of any art or science thoroughly who does not write as well as read upon the subject. [ Blakey ]
As the index tells us the contents of stories and directs to the particular chapter, even so does the outward habit and superficial order of garments (in man or woman) give us a taste of the spirit, and demonstratively point (as it were a manual note from the margin) all the internal quality of the soul; and there cannot be a more evident, palpable, gross manifestation of poor, degenerate, dunghilly blood and breeding than a rude, unpolished, disordered, and slovenly outside. [ Massinger ]
I smoke in bed until I have to go to sleep; I wake up in the night, sometimes once, sometimes twice; sometimes three times, and I never waste any of these opportunities to smoke. This habit is so old and dear and precious to me that I would feel as you, sir, would feel if you should lose the only moral you've got - meaning the chairman - if you've got one: I am making no charges: I will grant, here, that I have stopped smoking now and then, for a few months at a time, but it was not on principle, it was only to show off; it was to pulverize those critics who said I was a slave to my habits and couldn't break my bonds. [ Mark Twain, Seventieth Birthday speech ]