This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Habit will reconcile us to everything but change, and even to change if it recur not too quickly." - Charles Caleb Colton
"Everybody knows that the long continuance of a routine of habit makes us lethargic, while a succession of surprises wonderfully brightens the ideas. Where there is a motion, where history is a-making, there is the focus of mental activity, and it has been said that the arts and sciences reside within the temple of Janus, waking when that is open, but slumbering when it is closed." -
"The pressure that has been brought to bear upon the native people, since the cessation of armed conflict, in the attempt to force conformity of custom and habit has caused a reaction more destructive than war, and the injury has not only affected the Indian, but has extended to the white population as well. Tyranny, stupidity, and lack of vision have brought about the situation now alluded to as the “Indian Problem.”" -
"Character is shaped by deeds, and character is partly habit." - Claude Montefiore, fully Claude Joseph Goldsmid "C.G." Montefiore
"Fear is not in the habit of speaking truth; when perfect sincerity is expected, perfect freedom must be allowed; nor has any one who is apt to be angry when he hears the truth, any cause to wonder that he does not hear it." - Tacitus, fully Publius (or Gaius) Cornelius Tacitus NULL
"Liberty is not merely a privilege to be conferred; it is a habit to be acquired." - David Lloyd George, 1st Earl Lloyd-George of Dwyfor
"Get into the habit of being both strict and friendly toward yourself; demand a certain standard of performance; approve of yourself, even reward yourself if you attain it. For too often we pursue just the wrong tactics. When we should be acting, we indulge or excuse ourselves for inactivity; we then upbraid and punish ourselves ruthlessly and futility. The scolding is futile because we somehow feel that, if we have been severe and cutting to ourselves, we have in some way atoned for the fault of non-performance. We have not, of course. We have not done what we planned, and we have discouraged and hurt ourselves in the bargain." - Dorothea Brande
"Happiness is a habit - cultivate it." - Elbert Green Hubbard
"If you do not wish to be prone to anger, do not feed the habit; give it nothing which may tend to its increase." - Epictetus "the Stoic" NULL
"If you want to do something, make a habit of it; if you want not to do something, refrain from doing it." - Epictetus "the Stoic" NULL
"Nothing really pleasant or unpleasant subsists by nature, but all things become so by habit." - Epictetus "the Stoic" NULL
"Habit, my friend, is practice long pursued, that at last becomes man himself." - Evenus or Evenus of Paros, alt. Euenus NULL
"Choose the life that is most useful, and habit will make it most agreeable." - Francis Bacon
"Habit, if wisely and skillfully formed, becomes truly a second nature; but unskillfully and unmethodically depicted, it will be as it were an ape of nature, which imitates nothing to the life, but only clumsily and awkwardly." - Francis Bacon
"Take nothing for granted as beautiful or ugly, but take every building to pieces, and challenge every feature. Learn to distinguish the curious from the beautiful. Get the habit of analysis - analysis will in time enable synthesis to become your habit of mind. 'Think simples' as my old master used to say - meaning to reduce the whole of its parts into the simplest terms, getting back to first principles." - Frank Lloyd Wright, born Frank Lincoln Wright
"Education is the art of making men ethical... To this extent, habit is part of ethical life as it is of philosophic thought." - Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
"Creativity can solve almost any problem. The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality, overcomes everything." - George Lois
"A body seriously out of equilibrium, either with itself or with its environment, perishes outright. Not so a mind. Madness and suffering can set themselves no limit; they lapse only when the corporeal frame that sustains them yields to circumstances and changes its habit." - George Santayana
"Habit is stronger than reason." - George Santayana
"Love is but a prelude to life, an overture in which the theme of the impending work is exquisitely hinted at, but which remains nevertheless only a symbol and a promise. What is to follow, if all goes well, begins presently to appear. Passion settles down into possession, courtship into partnership, pleasure into habit. A child, half mystery and half plaything, comes to show us what we have done and to make its consequences perpetual. We see that by indulging our inclination we have woven about us a net from which we cannot escape: our choices, bearing fruit, begin to manifest our destiny. That life which once seemed to spread out infinitely before us is narrowed to one mortal career. We learn that in morals the infinite is a chimera, and that in accomplishing anything definite a man renounces everything else. He sails henceforth for one point of the compass." - George Santayana
"Ninety-nine percent of the failures come from people who have a habit of making excuses." - George Washington Carver
"There is a sphere where the enthusiasm of love is the calm habit of the soul, that without words, without the demonstrations of affection, heart beats to heart, soul answers soul, we respond to the Infinite Love, and we feel his answer in us, and there is no need of words." - Harriet Beecher Stowe
"One has to grow up with good talk in order to form the habit of it." - Helen Hayes
"Habit and routine have an unbelievable power to waste and destroy" - Henri de Lubac
"I believe that the mind can be permanently profaned by the habit of attending to trivial things. Read not the times, read the eternities." - Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
"As to diseases, make a habit of two things: to help, or at least, do no harm." - Hippocrates, fully known as Hippocrates of Cos or Hippokrates of Kos NULL
"All real joy and power of progress... depend on finding something to reverence, and all the baseness and misery of humanity begin in a habit of disdain." - John Ruskin
"All real joy and power of progress in humanity depend on finding something to reverence, and all the baseness and misery of humanity begin in a habit of disdain." - John Ruskin
"That which is the result of habit affords no presumption of being intrinsically good." - John Stuart Mill
"Will is the child of desire, and passes out of the dominion of its parent only to come under that of habit." - John Stuart Mill
"I have always preferred cheerfulness to mirth. The former is an act, the latter a habit of the mind. Mirth is short and transient; cheerfulness, fixed and permanent. Mirth is like a flash of lightning, that breaks through a gloom of clouds, and glitters for a moment. Cheerfulness keeps up a kind of daylight in the mind, filling it with a steady and perpetual serenity." - Joseph Addison
"Morality is made up of customs and habits. Custom makes public morality, and habit individual morality." - Joseph Joubert
"The habit of prayer communicates a penetrating sweetness to the glance, the voice, the smile, the tears, to all one says, or does or writes." - Joseph Roux
"Habit is memory in action." - Madame La Comtesse, Diane de Vobrillac (Marie de Beausacq)
"Habit is a second nature which prevents us from knowing the first, of which it has neither the cruelties nor the enchantments." - Marcel Proust, fully Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust
"You can start right where you stand and apply the habit of going the extra mile by rendering more service and better service than you are now being paid for." - Napoleon Hill
"Be always restless, unsatisfied, unconforming. Whenever a habit becomes convenient, smash it! The greatest sin of all is satisfaction." - Nikos Kazantzakis
"The habit of dropping choice thoughts into consciousness and allowing them to permeate the mental structure results finally in a thought pattern that affects virtually the totality of one's life." - Norman Vincent Peale
"By habit love enters the mind; by habit is love unlearnt." - Ovid, formally Publius Ovidius Naso NULL
"Nothing is more powerful than habit." - Ovid, formally Publius Ovidius Naso NULL
"Resist beginnings: it is too late to employ medicine when the evil has grown strong by inveterate habit." - Ovid, formally Publius Ovidius Naso NULL
"Virtue is a kind of health, beauty and habit of the soul." - Plato NULL
"As small letters hurt the sight, so do small matters him that is too much intent upon them: they vex and stir up anger, which begets an evil habit in him in reference to greater affairs." - Plutarch, named Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus after becoming Roman citizen NULL
"Character is long-standing habit." - Plutarch, named Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus after becoming Roman citizen NULL
"Authority and place demonstrate and try the tempers of men, by moving every passion and discovering every frailty." - Plutarch, named Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus after becoming Roman citizen NULL
"Children are to be won to follow liberal studies by exhortations and rational motives, and on no account to be forced thereto by whipping." - Plutarch, named Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus after becoming Roman citizen NULL