Unconscious Habits Quotes

We get stuck in old thought and behavior patterns that may have been effective when we were twelve months or twelve years old, but now only serve to hold us back. And, while those around us may have no problem correcting our minor flaws, they let the big ones slide, because it would mean attacking who we are.

Most people are completely unaware of their breath. They violate your space, they have no idea that they have halitosis.

I never think it's right to chew gum in front of other people, but a lot of times I'll come in for a meeting chewing gum and I'll forget I'm chewing it. Then you don't want to swallow it because it stays in your system for seven years or something, so I've asked to throw it away. I've started to wonder if that's why I didn't get certain movies.

The things that are more my own style are something that I don't really have to think about. The only time I have to think about them is if I want to force myself not to do it the way I do it.

The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice, there is little we can do to change; until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.

People have nervous tics they don't know about, and I would advise asking around. Ask the casting director, 'Is there something I'm doing?' I would see people unconsciously rocking back and forth. I roll my lips. I bite my lips and roll them.

Most of the time I'm really not aware of what I am doing. I'm just so locked into the moment.

Expelled from individual consciousness by the rush of change, history finds its revenge by stamping the collective unconsciousness with habits and values.

Activities that seem to represent choices are often inert reproductions of accepted practice.

When cultural change succeeds, it succeeds because it's so embedded in what we do that we don't have to think about.

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.]

Without the aid of prejudice and custom, I should not be able to find my way across the room.

All of us have a lot of physical tics that we don't realize that we're doing subconsciously.

The key to transforming mental models is to interrupt the automatic responses that are driven by the old model and respond differently based on the new model. Each time you are able to do this, you are actually loosening the old circuit and creating new neural connections in your brain, often referred to as self-directed neuroplasticity.

I'm not aware of having a creepy laugh, but apparently I do.

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.

Self-awareness moves us beyond the old, well-worn pathways in the brain that support fixed, unconscious habits.

We all press buttons in relationships, in our dealings with people, without thinking what it really means. We all knock along without questioning what kind of situation we're in. We may often be in a very good one, but we don't even appreciate the good situations. We're lazy. Or we're scared. Or we just don't notice.

We go through life owned by the stories we tell ourselves which are often historic and charged narratives - things we've learnt since childhood that we don't even consciously realise are going on.

I am constantly distracted by my own brain when I've completed a paragraph, realized I don't know what comes next, and start opening a browser tab without even realizing it.

The use of chance operations opened out my way of working. The body tends to be habitual. The use of chance allowed us to find new ways to move and to put movements together that would not otherwise have been available to us. It revealed possibilities that were always there except that my mind hadn't seen them.

For imagination sets the goal picture which our automatic mechanism works on. We act, or fail to act, not because of will, as is so commonly believed, but because of imagination.

To be honest, sometimes I'm horrified because you don't really know what you look like. If I really knew what I was doing on-screen, I would try to stop doing it.

I don't know why my smile has become a signature pose. I think it's a nice change. I think people want to see happiness, so a smile is what can bring that. I didn't make it my trademark on purpose.