Virginia Woolf Quotes

It is the fixed that horrifies us, the fixed that assails us with the tremendous force of mindlessness. The fixed is a Mason jar,and we can't beat it open. ...The fixed is a world without fire--dead flint, dead tinder, and nowhere a spark. It is motion without direction, force without power, the aimless procession of caterpillars round the rim of a vase, and I hate it because at any moment I myself might step to that charmed and glistening thread.

For me, habit is just a synonym for death.

When we get in a routine we can become zombie-like and shut down.

Habit is a great deadener.

Nobody has ever thought himself to death. The chief danger confronting us is not age. It is laziness, sloth, routine, stupidity, - forcing their way in like wind through the shutters, seeping into the cellar like swamp water.

Nobody is going to move. Here is the story folks.

We are on Sunday night because that is where they put us 30-odd years ago. I think we became a habit.

It's stasis that kills you off in the end, not ambition.

The tendency is to keep doing things the way you have done them.

We walk ourselves into ruts so deep we cannot see over them.

A lot of the time nothing happens in a day.

When you do anything for eight or nine years, you start getting a little comfortable; you start taking things for granted.

A lot of people mistake habit for hard work. Doing something over and over again is not working hard.

The vigorous man industriously striving for the improvement of his condition acts neither more nor less than the lethargic man who sluggishly takes things as they come. For to do nothing and to be idle are also action, they too determine the course of events.

Nothing happened, and nothing kept happening.

Sometimes, the hardest habit to break is the habit of doing nothing beyond the necessary.

Day after day, day after day, We stuck, nor breath nor motion; As idle as a painted ship Upon a painted ocean.

They grow stiff in the joints. They get in a rut. They go to seed.

Habit and routine have an unbelievable power to waste and destroy.

Men fall into a routine when they are tired and slack: it has all the appearance of activity with few of its burdens.

The other producer of old age is habit: the deathly process of doing the same thing in the same way at the same hour day after day, first from carelessness, then from inclination, at last from cowardice or inertia. Luckily the inconsequent life is not the only alternative; for caprice is as ruinous as routine. Habit is necessary; it is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive.

So fixed are our spirits in slothfulness and cold indifference that we seldom overcome so much as one evil habit.

If it required some effort to go from today to tomorrow, some people would always remain in yesterday.

We always know which is the best road to follow, but we follow only the road that we have become accustomed to.

if you stay still, earth buries you, ready or not.