"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit." Aristotle

"A nail is driven out by another nail. Habit is overcome by habit." Desiderius Erasmus

"First we form habits, then they form us. Conquer your bad habits or they will conquer you."
Rob Gilbert

"Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are." Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

"Power is the faculty or capacity to act, the strength and potency to accomplish something. It is the vital energy to make choices and decisions. It also includes the capacity to overcome deeply embedded habits and to cultivate higher, more effective ones." Stephen R. Covey

"Winning is a habit. Unfortunately, so is losing." Vince Lombardi

"Your net worth to the world is usually determined by what remains after your bad habits are subtracted from your good ones." Benjamin Franklin

"Habits… the only reason they persist is that they are offering some satisfaction… You allow them to persist by not seeking any other, better form of satisfying the same needs. Every habit, good or bad, is acquired and learned in the same way - by finding that it is a means of satisfaction." Juliene Berk

"Once you learn to quit, it becomes a habit." Vince Lombardi

"I never could have done what I have done without the habits of punctuality, order, and diligence, without the determination to concentrate myself on one subject at a time." Charles Dickens

"It is hard to let old beliefs go. They are familiar. We are comfortable with them and have spent years building systems and developing habits that depend on them. Like a man who has worn eyeglasses so long that he forgets he has them on, we forget that the world looks to us the way it does because we have become used to seeing it that way through a particular set of lenses. Today, however, we need new lenses. And we need to throw the old ones away." Kenich Ohmae

"Good habits result from resisting temptation." Indian Proverb

"As a twig is bent the tree inclines." Virgil

"Thoughts lead on to purposes; purposes go forth in action; actions form habits; habits decide character; and character fixes our destiny." Tryon Edwards

"Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit."Henry Adams

"A man’s fortune has its form given to it by his habits."Anonymous

"Bad habits are like a comfortable bed, easy to get into, but hard to get out of."Anonymous

"Men acquire a particular quality by constantly acting in a particular way."Anonymous

"What a curious phenomenon it is that you can get men to die for the liberty of the world who will not make the little sacrifice that is needed to free themselves from their own individual bondage."
Bruce Barton

"1. Be Proactive.
2. Begin with the end in mind.
3. Put first things first.
4. Think win win.
5. Seek first to understand . . . then to be understood.
6. Synergize.
7. Sharpen the saw."
Stephen R. Covey

"It seems, in fact, as though the second half of a man’s life is made up of nothing but the habits he has accumulated during the first half."
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky

"Ill habits gather by unseen degrees,—
As brooks make rivers, rivers run to seas."John Dryden

"Any act often repeated soon forms a habit; and habit allowed, steadily gains in strength. At first it may be but as the spider's web, easily broken through, but if not resisted it soon binds us with chains of steel."Tyron Edwards

"The long span of the bridge of your life is supported by countless cables called habits, attitudes, and desires. What you do in life depends upon what you are and what you want. What you get from life depends upon how much you want it—how much you are willing to work and plan and cooperate and use your resources. The long span of the bridge of your life is supported by countless cables that you are spinning now, and that is why today is such an important day. Make the cables strong!"
L.G. Elliott

"Heartily know,
When half-gods go,
The gods arrive."
Ralph Waldo Emerson

"We are what we think; as we desire so do we become! By our thoughts, desires, and habits, we either ascend to the full divine dignity of our nature, or we descend to suffer and learn."
J. Todd Ferrier

"Every woman should eat for the long run so she can manage the short stops of crisis."
Jane Fonda

"We're worn into grooves by Time—by our habits. In the end, these grooves are going to show whether we've been second rate or champions, each in his way in dispatching the affairs of every day. By choosing our habits, we determine the grooves into which Time will wear us; and these are grooves that enrich our lives and make for ease of mind, peace, happiness — achievement."
Frank B. Gilberth

"Those who have attained things worth having in this world have worked while others idled, have persevered when others gave up in despair, have practiced early in life the valuable habits of self-denial, industry, and singleness of purpose. As a result, they enjoy in later life the success so often erroneously attributed to good luck."Grenville Kleiser

"The unfortunate thing about this world is that good habits are so much easier to give up than bad ones."William Somerset Maugham

"Small habits well pursued betimes
May reach the dignity of crimes."
Hannah More

"Habits change into character."
Publius Ovidius Naso Ovid

"A large part of virtue consists in good habits."
Barbara Paley

"Moral habits, induced by public practices, are far quicker in making their way into men’s private lives, than the failings and faults of individuals are in infecting the city at large."
Plutarch

"How use doth breed a habit in a man!"William Shakespeare

"In one sense the whole process of development consists of the formation of habits; for knowledge itself, and the powers of thought, as well as the higher elements in the will, all depend upon the establishment of fixed ways of reacting to given stimuli. Consequently, the general laws of habituation underlie the whole of education. But the term habit is more commonly restricted to those established reactions that act with little or no participation of consciousness, or, in other words, mechanically or automatically. Such habits as these begin to form very early, and constitute a kind of supporting framework for the higher elements of character."
Edward O. Sisson

"The secret of the whole matter is that a habit is not the mere tendency to repeat a certain act, nor is it established by the mere repetition of the act. Habit is a fixed tendency to react or respond in a certain way to a given stimulus; and the formation of habit always involves the two elements, the stimulus and the response or reaction. The indolent lad goes to school not in response to any stimulus in the school itself, but to the pressure of his father's will; when that stimulus is absent, the reaction as a matter of course does not occur."
Edward O. Sisson

"Powerful indeed is the empire of habit."Publilius Syrus

"A habit cannot be tossed out the window; it must be coaxed down the stairs a step at a time."
Mark Twain

"Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits."
Mark Twain

The chains of habit are generally too small to be felt until they are too strong to be broken. ~Samuel Johnson

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

A habit is something you can do without thinking - which is why most of us have so many of them. ~Frank A. Clark

Ill habits gather by unseen degrees -
As brooks make rivers, rivers run to seas.
~John Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel, 1681

Bad habits are easier to abandon today than tomorrow. ~Yiddish Proverb

The unfortunate thing about this world is that good habits are so much easier to give up than bad ones. ~Somerset Maugham

Habit, if not resisted, soon becomes necessity. ~St. Augustine

The second half of a man's life is made up of nothing but the habits he has acquired during the first half. ~Feodor Dostoevski

Enduring habits I hate.... Yes, at the very bottom of my soul I feel grateful to all my misery and bouts of sickness and everything about me that is imperfect, because this sort of thing leaves me with a hundred backdoors through which I can escape from enduring habits. ~Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 1882

Habits are at first cobwebs, then cables. ~Spanish Proverb

Habit is a second nature which prevents us from knowing the first, of which it has neither the cruelties nor the enchantments. ~Marcel Proust

The satisfied, the happy, do not live; they fall asleep in habit, near neighbor to annihilation. ~Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life, 1913

Habit is thus the enormous flywheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor. ~William James, The Principles of Psychology

In any family, measles are less contagious than bad habits. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Men's natures are alike; it is their habits that separate them. ~Confucius, Analects

Habit with him was all the test of truth;
It must be right: I've done it from my youth.
~George Crabbe, The Borough

Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits. ~Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar for 1894

Small habits well pursued betimes
May reach the dignity of crimes.
~Hannah More

To fall into a habit is to begin to cease to be. ~Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life

Habit is a man's sole comfort. We dislike doing without even unpleasant things to which we have become accustomed. ~Goethe

Every grown-up man consists wholly of habits, although he is often unaware of it and even denies having any habits at all. ~Georges Gurdjieff

The best way to break a bad habit is to drop it. ~Leo Aikman