This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"This is what a father ought to be about: helping his son to form the habit of doing right on his own initiative, rather than because he's afraid of some serious consequence." - Terence, full Latin name Publius Terentius Afer NULL
"Men are not corrupted by the exercise of power or debased by the habit of obedience, but by the exercise of a power which they believe to be illegitimate, and by obedience to a rule which they consider to be usurped and oppressive." - Alexis de Tocqueville, fully Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville
"Habit rules the unreflecting herd." - William Wordsworth
"Today’s action becomes tomorrow’s habit." - Michael E. Angier
"Much of our ethical life is lived unthinkingly, for we do as we do by habit, custom, tradition, or because we have thought the pros and cons of similar situations. We must somehow be able to decide what is valuable at this moment while at the same time remaining open to future revisions in our valuational pattern. This willingness to revise, to be open to new possibilities of value, is for me a key to life and value enhancement." - Robert E. Carter, fully Robert Edgar Carter
"Ultimately our moral sense or conscience becomes a highly complex sentiment – originating in the social instinct, largely guided by the approbation of our fellow men, ruled by reason, self-interest, and in alter times by deep religious feelings, and confirmed by instruction and habit." - Charles Darwin, fully Charles Robert Darwin
"Eliminate something superfluous from your life. Break a habit. Do something that makes you feel insecure." - Piero Ferrucci
"Religion declined not because it was refuted but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid. When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion – its message becomes meaningless." - Abraham Joshua Heschel
"Habit simplifies the movements required to achieve a given result, makes them more accurate and diminishes fatigue." - William James
"Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life. Each lapse is like the letting fall of a ball of string which one is carefully winding up, a single slip undoes more than a great many turns will wind again. Continuity of training is the great means of making the nervous system act infallible right." - William James
"Worldliness is not, in the last analysis, love of possessions, or the habit of courting great personages. It is simply the weakness of fibre which makes us take our standards from the society round us." - Ronald Knox, fully Ronald Arbuthnott Knox
"Much of [Winston Churchill’s] strength as a war leader derived from this very habit of myth-making, of surrounding even the ordinary and the humdrum with enchantment. Like Shakespeare’s Glendower, he could “call spirits from the vast deep” – and the British believed in them." - Ronald Lewin, fully George Ronald Lewin
"To be fruitful in invention, it is indispensable to have a habit of observation and reflection." - Abraham Lincoln
"We know tradition as a living social process constantly changing, constantly in need of criticism, but constant also as the continuing memory, value system and habit structure of a society." - Richard Niebuhr, fully Helmut Richard Niebuhr
"By “nationalism” I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labeled “good” or “bad.” But secondly… I mean the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognizing no other duty than that of advancing its interests. Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism… By “patriotism” I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force upon other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality." -
"It is customary to blame secular science and anti-religious philosophy for the eclipse of religion in modern society. It would be more honest to blame religion for its own defeats. Religion declined not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid. When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion, its message becomes meaningless." - Fritz A. Rothschild
"[Idolatry as] the moments when we forget who we really are and instead of remembering that we are sparks of the Divine, we start giving up our power to a guru, an ideology, a romantic obsession, a stressful job that begins to define us, or an unhealthy habit we think we can’t live without. Even is we no longer build or worship physical idols like in ancient times, we have modern-day addictions and pressures that cause us to forget that our purpose here is to be a vehicle for Divine energies." - Ted Falcon
"Science is neither a philosophy nor a belief system. It is a combination of mental operations that has become increasingly the habit of educated peoples, a culture of illuminations hit upon by a fortunate turn of history that yielded the most effective way of learning about the real world ever conceived." -
"Men's manners have improved markedly since Genghis Khan's day. Harems went out of style centuries ago and even despots now disavow pillage and oppression as ideals. At heart, though, we're the same animals we were 800 years ago. Which is to say we are status seekers. We may talk of equality and fraternity. We may strive for classless societies. But we go right on building hierarchies and jockeying for status within them. Can we abandon the tendency? Probably not. For as scientists are now discovering, status seeking is not just a habit or cultural tradition. It's a design of the male psyche - a biological drive that is rooted in the nervous system and regulated by hormones and brain chemicals." -
"The habit of being uniformly considerate toward others will bring increased happiness to you." - Grenville Kleiser
"The habit of being uniformly considerate toward others will bring increased happiness to you" - Glenville Kreisler
"Once you learn to quit, it becomes a habit." - Vince Lombardi, fully Vincent Thomas "Vince" Lombardi
"Winning is not a sometime thing; it's an all time thing. You don't win once in a while, you don't do things right once in a while, you do them right all the time. Winning is habit. Unfortunately, so is losing." - Vince Lombardi, fully Vincent Thomas "Vince" Lombardi
"The beginning of a habit is like an invisible thread, but every time we repeat the act we strengthen the strand, add to it another filament, until it becomes a great cable and binds us irrevocably thought and act." - Orison Swett Marden
"The difference between the most dissimilar characters, between a philosopher and a common street porter… seems to arise not so much from nature, as from habit, custom, and education." - Adam Smith
"We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking." - Albert Camus
"Man is very much a creature of habit." - Alexander Hamilton
"Prayer is not only worship; it is also an invisible emanation of man’s worshipping spirit - the most powerful form of energy that one can generate. The influence of prayer on the human mind and body is as demonstrable as that of secreting glands. It results can be measured in terms of increased physical buoyancy, greater intellectual vigor, moral stamina, and a deeper understanding of the realities underlying human relationships. If you make a habit of sincere prayer, your life will be very noticeably and profoundly altered." - Alexis Carrel
"A brilliant achievement may win for you the favor of a people at one stroke; but to earn the love and respect of the population that surrounds you, a long succession of little services rendered and of obscure good deeds, a constant habit of kindness and an established reputation for disinterestedness will be required." - Alexis de Tocqueville, Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville
"True love begins when nothing is looked for in return. And if the habit of prayer is seen to be so important for teaching a man to love his fellow men, this is because no answer is given to his prayers. Your love is based on hatred when you wrap yourself up in a certain man or woman on whom you batten as a stock of food laid by and, like dogs snarling at teach other round their trough, you fall to hating anyone who casts even a glance at your repast. you call it love, this selfish appetite. No sooner is love bestowed on you than (even as in your false friendships) you convert this free gift into servitude and bondage and, from the very moment you are loved, you begin to fancy yourself wronged." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit." - Aristotle NULL
"Intellectual virtues owes both its birth and its growth to teaching (for which reason it requires experience and time), while moral virtue comes about as a result of habit... From this fact it is plain that none of the moral virtues arises in us by nature; for nothing that exists by nature can form a habit contrary to its nature." - Aristotle NULL
"When men hear imitations, even apart from the rhythms and tunes themselves, their feelings move in sympathy. Since then music is a pleasure, and virtue consists in rejoicing and loving and hating aright, there is clearly nothing which we are so much concerned to acquire and to cultivate as the power of forming right judgments and of taking delight in good dispositions and noble actions. Rhythm and melody supply imitations of anger and gentleness, and also of courage and temperance, and of all the qualities contrary to these, and of the other qualities of character, which hardly fall short of the actual affections, as we know form our own experience, for in listening to such strains our souls undergo a change. The habit of feeling pleasure or pain at mere representation is not far removed from the same feeling about realities." - Aristotle NULL
"Every action must be due to one or other of seven causes: chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reasoning, anger or appetite." - Aristotle NULL
"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an art, but a habit." - Aristotle NULL
"Every action must be due to one or other of seven causes: chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reasoning, anger, or appetite." - Aristotle NULL
"We become what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not a single act but a habit!”" - Aristotle NULL
"All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsions, habit, reason, passion, desire." - Aristotle NULL
"It is easy to perform a good action, but not easy to acquire a settled habit of performing such actions." - Aristotle NULL
"Moral excellence comes about as a result of habit. We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts." - Aristotle NULL
"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit." - Aristotle NULL
"[Man’s] self-conscious existence as man forces on him a choice of uses for his faculties... This choice is what is called free will. Free will, therefore, not only a prerogative but an obligation for man. Free will thus understood, has nothing to do with destiny. It is a power which man is compelled by his own nature to use, whether the use he makes of it is predestined or not... the responsibility of deciding rests with me just the same whether the outcome is predetermined or not. If it is predetermined, it is my own past habit-forming and character-forming decisions in this and previous lifetimes which have predetermined it; and this decision in its turn will help to condition my mind, thus determining future ones." - Arthur W Osborn
"Our eyes see only by permission of the mind... Truly our minds can be barriers, not because of the knowledge they acquire, but because of the intellectual habit of interpreting the unknown in terms of the known. The spiritual transcendent and the mind not only suffers defeat in trying to interpret it, but also blocks reception of the formless Real" - Arthur W Osborn
"No sin is too big for God to pardon, and none is too small for habit to magnify." - Bahya ben Joseph ibn Pakuda NULL
"Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth more than ruin more even than death.... Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man." - Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
"Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions and comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man." - Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
"Our imagination so magnifies this present existence, by the power of continual reflection on it, and so attenuates eternity, by not thinking of it at all, that we reduce an eternity; to nothingness, and expand a mere nothing to an eternity; and this habit is so inveterately rooted in us that all the force of reason cannot induce us to lay it aside." - Blaise Pascal
"The habit of doing one's duty drives out fear." - Charles Baudelaire