Quotes about habits

Habitualization carries with it the important psychological gain that choices are narrowed… the background of habitualized activity opens up a foreground for deliberation and innovation [which demand a higher level of attention].

And now I understand something so frightening, and wonderful — how the mind clings to the road it knows, rushing through crossroads, sticking like lint to the familiar.

People usually take for granted that the way things are is the way things must be.

I have often thought, if it was not for this Tyranny which Custom usurps over us, that Men of any tolerable Good-nature could never be reconcil'd to the killing of so many Animals for their daily Food, as long as the bountiful Earth so plentifully provides them with Varieties of vegetable Dainties.

Anyone who has wasted hours surfing the Internet knows that technology can encourage bad habits.

It seems, in theory, that I should be able to control at least a few of my bad habits. The problem is that my habits make me depressed, and the depression makes me want to indulge my habits and so I do. There isn't any solution to this.

Riding on a city bus along the route that you have taken from your job, from the movies, from a hundred Chinese meals, with the same late sun going down over the same peeling buildings and the same hot smell of water in the aftershower air, can be, in the wake of a catastrophe, either a surrealistic nightmare of the ordinary or a plunge into the warm waters of beautiful routine.

Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits.

Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs one step at a time.

If humanity has one majestic talent, it’s an almost infinite capacity to get used to the Next Big Thing…then take it for granted.

Here I am, between my flock and my treasure, the boy thought. He had to choose between something he had become accustomed to and something he wanted to have.

A work-room should be like an old shoe; no matter how shabby, it's better than a new one.