This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"The habit of being happy enables one to be freed, or largely freed, from the domination of outward conditions." - Robert Louis Stevenson, fully Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson
"Charity should be the habit of our estimates; kindness of our feelings; benevolence of our affections; cheerfulness of our social intercourse; generosity of our living; improvement of our progress; prayer of our desires; fidelity of our sex-examination; being and doing good of our entire life." - John Tillotson, Archbishop of Canterbury
"When we have practiced good action awhile, they become easy; when they are easy, we take pleasure in them; when they please us, we do them frequently; and then, by frequency of act, they grow into a habit." - John Tillotson, Archbishop of Canterbury
"Ideology is not the product of thought; it is the habit or the ritual of showing respect for certain formulas to which, for various reasons having to do with emotional safety, we have every strong ties of whose meaning and consequences in actuality we have no clear understanding." - Lionel Trilling
"I will this day try to live a simple, sincere, and serene life; repelling promptly every thought of discontent, anxiety, discouragement, impurity, and self-seeking; cultivating cheerfulness, magnanimity, charity, and the habit of holy silence; exercising economy in expenditure, carefulness in conversation, diligence in appointed service, fidelity to every trust, and a childlike trust in God." - John H. Vincent, fully John Heyl Vincent
"Delude not yourself with the notion that you may be untrue and uncertain in trifles and in important things the contrary. Trifles make up existence, and give the observer the measure by which to trust; and the fearful power of habit, after a time, suffers not the best will to ripen into action." - Carl Maria von Weber, fully Carl Maria Friedrich Ernst, Freiherr (Baron) von Weber
"Delude not yourself with the notion that you may be untrue and uncertain in trifles and in important things the contrary. Trifles make up existence, and give the measure by which to try us; and the fearful power of habit, after a time, suffers not the best will to ripen into action." - Carl Maria von Weber, fully Carl Maria Fredrich Ernst von Weber
"Educate your children of self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies subject to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future lives and crimes from society." - Daniel Webster
"It is impossible to quench the thirst for desires by giving into desires. Just the opposite occurs. A person becomes thirstier for more desires. Trying to acquire good traits is entirely different. When you first try to acquire those virtues, you might find it bitter. However, when you master the habit of doing good, you feel great sweetness. Therefore the person who seeks his pleasure in becoming a better person will find true enjoyment in his life." -
"While an open mind is priceless, it is priceless only when its owner has the courage to make a final decision which closes the mind for action after the process of viewing all sides of the question has been completed. Failure to make a decision after due consideration of all the facts will quickly brand a man unfit for a position of responsibility. Not all of your decisions will be correct. None of us is perfect. But if you get into the habit of making decisions, experience will develop your judgment to a point where more and more of your decisions will be right. After all, it is better to be right 51 percent of the time and get something done, than it is to get nothing done because you fear to reach a decision." - H. W. Andrews
"Marriage should combat without respite or mercy that monster which devours everything - habit." - Honoré de Balzac
"Habits - the only reason they persist is that they are offering some satisfaction. You allow them to persist by not seeking any other, better form of satisfying the same needs. Every habit, good or bad, is acquired and learned in the same way - by finding that it is a means of satisfaction." - Juliene Berk
"The habit of reflecting gives an inner life, which all that we see animates and embellishes. In this disposition of the soul everything becomes an object of thought." - Carl Victor de Bonstetten
"Example has more followers than reason. We unconsciously imitate what pleases us, and insensibly approximate to the characters we most admire. In this way, a generous habit of thought and of action carries with it an incalculable influence." - Christian Nestell Bovee
"Successful parenthood is built on three great principles which cut deep into the foundations of a structure, support and stimulate the right formation of habit in the building of life. They are love, discipline, and security. Without all these, a child's life is stunted from the very beginning." - Elsie Landon Buck
"The man who has acquired the habit of study, though for only one hour every day in the year, and keeps to the one thing studied till it is mastered, will be startled to see the way he has made at the end of a twelvemonth." - Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton
"There are five tests of the evidence of education - correctness and precision in the use of the mother tongue; refined and gentle manners, the result of fixed habits of thought and action; sound standards of appreciation of beauty and of worth, and a character based on those standards; power and habit of reflection, efficiency or the power to do." - Nicholas Murray Butler
"Nature has made occupation a necessity to us; society makes a duty; habit may make it a pleasure." - Capelle NULL
"The man who can really, in living union of the mind and heart, converse with God through nature, finds in the material forms around him, a source of power and happiness inexhaustible, and like the life of angels. The highest life and glory of man is to be alive unto God; and when this grandeur of sensibility to him, and this power of communion with him is carried, as the habit of the soul, into the forms of nature, then the walls of our world are as the gates of heaven." - George Barrell Cheever
"What helps luck is a habit of watching for opportunities, of having a patient, but restless mind, of sacrificing one's ease or vanity, of uniting a love of detail to foresight, and of passing through hard times bravely and cheerfully." - Victor Cherbuliez
"It is our American habit if we find the foundations of our educational structure unsatisfactory to add another story or wing. We find it easier to add a new study or course or kind of school than to recognize existing conditions so as to meet the need." - John Dewey
"Habit is the beneficent harness of routine which enables silly men to live respectfully and unhappy men to live calmly." - George Eliot, pen name of Mary Ann or Marian Evans
"The underlying cause of all weakness and unhappiness is man has always been, and still is, weak habit-of-thought." - Horace Fletcher, nicknamed "The Great Masticator"
"Each year, one vicious habit rooted out in time ought to make the worst man good." - Benjamin Franklin
"I develop the habit of expressing myself in terms of modest diffidence, never using, when I advanced anything that may possibly be disputed, the words certainly, undoubtedly, or any other that give the air of positiveness to an opinion, but rather say, I conceive or apprehend a thing to be so and so: It appear to me or should not think it, so or so, for such and such reasons; or I imagine it to be so, or it is so, if I am not mistaken. This habit I believe has been of great advantage to me when I have had occasion to inculcate my opinion and persuade men into measures that I have been, time to time, engaged in promoting." - Benjamin Franklin
"Public smoking, like public spitting, is becoming a socially unacceptable habit." - Ellen Goodman
"If I were to prescribe one process in the training of men which is fundamental to success in any direction, it would be thoroughgoing training in the habit of observation. It is a habit which every one of us should be seeking ever more to perfect." - Eugene Gifford Grace
"Faith is a practical habit, which like every other, is strengthened and increased by continual exercise. It is nourished by meditation, by prayer, and the devout perusal of the Scriptures; and the light which it diffuses becomes stronger and clearer by an uninterrupted converse with its object, and a faithful compliance with its dictates." -
"It is of things heavenly and universal declaration, working in them whose hearts God inspireth with the due consideration thereof, and habit or disposition of mind whereby they are made fit vessels both for the receipt and delivery of whatsoever spiritual perfection." - Richard Hooker
"When Goethe says that in every human condition foes lie in wait for us, “invincible only by cheerfulness and equanimity,” he does not mean that we can at all times be really cheerful, or at a moment’s notice; but that the endeavor to look at the better side of things will produce the habit, and that this habit is the surest safeguard against the danger of sudden evils." - James Henry Leigh Hunt
"I have no doubt whatever that most people live, whether physically, intellectually, or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness and of their souls’ resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole bodily organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger... We all have reservoirs of life to draw upon, of which we do not dream." - William James
"The secret of success of every man who has ever been successful lies in the fact that he formed the habit of doing those things that failures don't like to do." - A. J. King, fully Andrew Jackson King
"The artisan or scientist or the follower of whatever discipline who has the habit of comparing himself not with other followers but with the discipline itself will have a lower opinion of himself, the more excellent he is." - Giacomo Leopardi, fully al battesimo conte Giacomo Taldegardo Francesco di Sales Saverio Pietro Leopardi
"It is curious how tyrannical the habit of reading is, and what shifts we make to escape thinking. There is no bore we dread being left alone with so much as our own minds." - James Russell Lowell
"Habit causes love." - Lucretius, fully Titus Lucretius Carus NULL
"Nothing inspires confidence in a business man sooner than punctuality, nor is there any habit which sooner saps his reputation than that of being always behind time." - William Matthews
"We have lose the habit of thinking quietly, of trying to know ourselves and our friends, and the world around us, and the God who is above and within us. We are looking in the wrong places for happiness. We are so exclusively occupied with material things and with their accumulation that the higher values are crowded out." - Robert J. McCracken, D.D.
"Not in theory, but in truth, the best and most excellent government for each nation is the one under which it has preserved its existence. Its form and essential fitness depend on habit. We are prone to be discontented with the present state of things. But I maintain, nevertheless, that to wish for the government of a few in a democratic state, or another type of government in a monarchy, is foolish and wrong." - Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
"You must make a habit of thinking in terms of a definite objective." - John Henry Patterson
"The time we have at our disposal every day is elastic; the passions that we feel expand it, those that we inspire contract it; and habit fills up the rest." - Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
"Children are living beings - more living than grown-up people who have built shells of habit around themselves. Therefore it is absolutely necessary for their mental health and development that they should not have mere schools for their lessons, but a world whose guiding spirit is personal love." -