William Wordsworth Quotes

It is too bad if you have to do everything upon reflection and can't do anything from early habit.

There is a woman named Wendy Wood, who did a study when she was at Duke, and she followed around college students to try to figure out how much of their day was decision-making versus how much was habit. And what she found was that about 45 percent of all the behaviors that someone did in a day was habit.

We must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can. . . . The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work.

One study says that 90 percent of our everyday behavior is based on our habits. . . That means how we treat people, how we spend our money, what we watch, what we listen to - 90 percent of the time, we're on autopilot. We do what we've always done.

As our acts vary, our habits will follow in their course.

Man is very much a creature of habit. A thing that rarely strikes his senses will generally have but little influence upon his mind. A government continually at a distance and out of sight, can hardly be expected to interest the sensations of the people. The inference is, that the authority of the Union, and the affections of the citizens towards it, will be strengthened rather than weakened by its extension to what are called matters of internal concern.

Habit is a second nature, which destroys the first.

It is true from early habit, one must make love mechanically as one swims; I was once very fond of both, but now as I never swim unless I tumble into the water, I don't make love till almost obliged.

Habits are where our lives and careers and bodies are made.

Fully 95 percent of our behavior, feeling, and response is habitual.

Both success and failure are largely the results of HABIT!

Habit is the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit.

I'm doing a lot of speaking and talking about habits, which is this subject that obsesses me. That's a lot of fun.

It's easy to assume people are conforming when we witness them all choosing the same option, but when we choose that very option ourselves, we have no shortage of perfectly good reasons for why we just happen to be doing the same thing as those other people; they mindlessly conform, but we mindfully choose. This doesn't mean that we're all conformists in denial. It means that we regularly fail to recognize that others' thoughts and behaviors are just as complex and varied as our own. Rather than being alone in a crowd of sheep, we're all individuals in sheep's clothing.

What we believe as human nature in actuality is human habit.

Herd pressure is to be judged by two things: first, its intensity, and second, its direction.

Ninety-nine hundredths or, possibly, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths of our activity is purely automatic and habitual, from our rising in the morning to our lying down each night.

Once one habit peels away the others follow it. You have to hold on, or the next thing you'll find yourself parading down the street in your nightdress. Habit is everything.

No matter who you are, we're creatures of habit. The better your habits are, the better they will be in pressure situations.

Habit is formed out of memory... We often shape our present situation according to those habitual memories. Instead of starting fresh, we go back to what we've done in the past... easier for us than fighting our way through foreign territory.

Curious things, habits. People themselves never knew they had them. [Witness for the Prosecution, also published in The Hound of Death and Other Stories.]

Watch your habits, they determine your character.

The habits of a young man are, like his coat, removable; the habits of an old man are like the drapery of a statue.

Assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice.

How many small decisions accumulate to form a habit? What a multitude of decisions, made by others, in other times, must shape our lives now.