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We first make our habits then our habits make us.
Habit is a cable. We weave a thread of it every day, and at
last we cannot break it.
H. Mann
Habit is the deepest law of human nature.
Carlyle
Habit is either the best of servants or the worst of masters.
Emmons
The chains of habit are generally too small to be felt until
they are too strong to be broken.
Johnson
When we have practiced good actions awhile they become easy;
when they are easy we take pleasure in them; when they please
us we do them frequently; and then, by frequency of act, they
grow into a habit.
Tillotson
We are all the time following the influences which will
presently be our rulers; We are making our own destiny. We
are choosing our habits, our associates, our traits, our homes.
In time these acquire a power over us which enslaves our will,
and from them we neither will nor can break loose.
H. L. Wayland
Bad habits are as infectious by example as the plague itself is
by contact.
Fielding
In early childhood you may lay the foundation of poverty or
riches, industry or idleness, good or evil, by the habits to
which you train your children. Teach them right habits then
and their future life is safe.
Habits, though in their commencement like the filmy line of the
spider, trembling at every breeze, may in the end, prove as
links of tempered steel, binding a deathless being to eternal
felicity or woe.
Lydia H. Sigourney
Habit is the child of impulse. There is in human life the
period of impulse, when habit is nothing; and there is the
period of habit, when impulse is nothing. Young persons are
creatures of impulse; old persons are creatures of habit.
Almost every thing is impulse with a small child, and nothing
can be called habit; almost everything is habit in the second
childhood of old age, and there is very little that can be
called impulse.
G. B. Cheever
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
A large part of Christian virtue consists in good habits.
Paley
If we would know who is the most degraded and wretched of human
beings, look for a man who has practiced a vice so long that he
curses it and yet clings to it; that he pursues it because he
feels a great law of his nature driving him on toward it; but
reaching it, knows that it will gnaw his heart, and make him
roll himself in the dust with anguish. Habit, to which all of
us are more or less slaves.
Fontaine
Habits are to the soul what the veins and arteries are to the
blood, the courses in which it moves.
Horace Bushnell
Habit, if not resisted, soon becomes necessity.
Augustine
I trust everything, under God, to habit, upon which, in all
ages, the lawgiver as well as the schoolmaster has mainly
placed his reliance; habit which makes everything easy, and
casts all difficulties upon the deviation from the wonted
course. Make sobriety a habit, and intemperence will be
hateful and hard; make prudence a habit, and reckless
profligacy will be as contrary to the nature of a child, grown
to an adult, as the most atrocious crimes are to your
lordships. Give a child the habit of sacredly regarding the
truth, of carefully respecting the property of others, of
scrupulously abstaining from all acts of improvidence which can
involve him in distress, and he will just as likely think of
rushing into an element in which he cannot breathe, as of
lying, or cheating, or stealing.
Brougham
Habits are soon assumed; but when we endeaver to strip them
off, it is being flayed alive.
Cowper
All habits gather, by unseen degrees, as brooks make rivers,
rivers run to seas.
Dryden
The habit of virtue cannot be formed in a closet; good habits
are formed by acts of reason in a persevering struggle with
temptation.
B. Gilpin
In a majority of things habit is a greater plague than ever
afflicted Egypt. In religious character it is a grand
felicity.
John Foster
Charity should be the habit of our estimates; kindness of our
feelings; benevolence of our affections; cheerfulness of our
social intercourse; generosity of our living; improvement of
our progress; prayer of our desires; fidelity of our self-
examination; being and doing good of our enire life.
Tillotson
The phrases that men hear or repeat continually end by becoming
convictions and ossify the organs of intelligence.
Goethe
Habits are the petrifaction of feelings.
L. E. Landon
Habits work more constantly and with greater force than reason,
which, when we have most need of it, is seldom fairly
consulted, and more rarely obeyed.
Loche
Long customs are not easily broken; he that attempts to change
the course of his own life very often labors in vain.
Johnson
The habits of time are the soul's dress for eternity. Habit
passes with its owner beyond this world into a world where
destiny is determined by character, and character is the sum
and expression of all preceding habit.
G. B. Cheever
Good habits are the best magistrates.
Bentham
Like flakes of snow that fall imperceptibly upon the earth, the
seemingly unimportant events of life suceed one another. As
the snowflakes gather, so our habits are formed. No single
flake that is added to the pile produces a sensible change.
No single action creates, however it may exhibit a man's
character.
Bentham
Sin is first pleasing, then it grows easy, then delightful,
then frequent, then habitual, then confirmed; then the man is
impenitent, then he is obstinate, then he is resolved never to
repent, and then he is ruined.
Leighton
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