Routine Actions Quotes

Every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character.

Knowledge helps only when it descends into habits.

If you really want to judge the character of a man, look not at his great performances. Watch a man do his most common actions.

Sometimes we do things a certain way just because that is the way we do things.

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.

Habit rules the unreflecting herd.

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

Happily for me, ninety-nine percent of all human life is spent simply repeating the same old actions, speaking the same tired clichés, moving like a zombie through the same steps of the dance we plodded through yesterday and the day before and the day before. It seems horribly dull and pointless-but it really makes a great deal of sense. After all, if you only have to follow the same path every day, you don't need to think at all. Considering how good humans are at any mental process more complicated than chewing, isn't that the best for everybody?

Small things done consistently, though undramatic, yield more than the large and sporadic.

Our character is basically a composite of our habits.

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.

Every habit makes our hand more witty and our wit less handy.

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.

Most of our faculties lie dormant because they can rely upon Habit, which knows what there is to be done and has no need of their services.

No, I'm a very normal and orthodox person that goes out of their way to present eccentricity. It's not that I do that so much now but I've been doing it for so many years that it's become routine now.

How do most people live without any thought? There are many people in the world,--you must have noticed them in the street,--how do they live? How do they get strength to put on their clothes in the morning?