Although I myself don't go to church or synagogue, I do, whether it's superstition or whatever, pray every time I get on a plane. I just automatically do it. I say the same thing every time.
The 'OK Plateau' is that place we all get to where we just stop getting better at something. Take typing, for example. You might type and type and type all day long, but once you reach a certain level, you just don't get appreciably faster. That's because it's become automatic. You've moved it to the back of your mind's filing cabinet.
I was never one to think about why I need to go running or go to the gym - it just came naturally to me.
To hang on from day to day and from week to week, spinning out a present that had no future, seemed an unconquerable instinct, just as one's lungs will always draw the next breath so long as there is air available.
Habits are safer than rules; you don't have to watch them. And you don't have to keep them either. They keep you.
Knowledge helps only when it descends into habits.
The mind is divided, like a rider on an elephant, and the rider’s job is to serve the elephant. The rider is our conscious reasoning-the stream of words and images of which we are fully aware. The elephant is the other 99 percent of mental processes-the ones that occur outside of awareness but that actually govern most of our behavior.
Nothing is stronger than habit.
My fingers always seem busier than my mind.
The power of habit is very strong.
Most of the time I'm really not aware of what I am doing. I'm just so locked into the moment.
Habit is the strongest thing in life.
When you've sung the same song a million or a hundred thousand times, there are always moments when you drift off and go into automatic.
I follow my course with the precision and security of a sleepwalker.
We would not - from here - counsel anyone to be guided by influences from without. ... If these come as in inspirational writings from within, and not as guidance from others - that is different ... the inspirational may develop the soul of the individual, while the automatic may rarely reach beyond the force that is guiding or directing.
When cultural change succeeds, it succeeds because it's so embedded in what we do that we don't have to think about.
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.
I have a lot of glass in my house, and I remember saying as a joke once that I clean my stuff with Windex while my friends are over, but then I found myself actually doing that the other day. It's horrible.
Only in sex the noise sometimes stops. I say "sometimes". If you have become habitual in sex also, as husbands and wives become, then it never stops. The whole act becomes automatic and the mind goes on its own. Then sex also is a boredom.
Habit rules the unreflecting herd.
Habit is a cable; we weave a thread of it each day, and at last we cannot break it.
Habit has a kind of poetry.
It is too bad if you have to do everything upon reflection and can't do anything from early habit.
The thing I want to know is, if you tell your brain not to do stuff... and it keeps doing it anyway, does that mean your mind has a mind of its own? And if it does, then who's in charge here, anyway?
It's an accompaniment to life. It's not something that I do to rap; I smoke when I open my eyes...I don't know any other feeling.
