Habit

Habits are automatic routines of behavior that are repeated regularly, without thinking. They are learned, not instinctive, human behaviors that occur automatically, without the explicit contemporaneous intention of the person. The person may not be paying attention to or be conscious or aware of the behavior. When the behavior is brought to the person's attention, they may be able to control it.

Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895).

• A large part of Christian virtue consists in right habits.
  • William Paley, p. 295.

• Give a child the habit of sacredly regarding the truth—of carefully respecting the property of others — of scrupulously abstaining from all acts of improvidence which can involve him in distress, and he will just as likely think of rushing into the element in which he cannot breathe, as of lying or cheating or stealing.
  • Henry Brougham, 1st Baron Brougham and Vaux]], p. 295.

• Centres, or centre-pieces of wood, are put by builders under an arch of stone while it is in the process of construction till the key-stone is put in. Just such is the use Satan makes of pleasures to construct evil habits upon; the pleasure lasts till the habit is fully formed; but that done, the habit may stand eternal. The pleasures are sent for firewood, and the hell begins in this life.
  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1st Baron Brougham and Vaux]], p. 295.

• Infinite toil would not enable you to sweep away a mist, but by ascending a little you may often look over it altogether. So it is with our moral improvement; we wrestle fiercely with a vicious habit, which could have no hold upon us if we ascended to a higher atmosphere.
  • Sir Arthur Helps, 1st Baron Brougham and Vaux]], p. 296.

• Habit if not resisted soon becomes necessity.
  • Augustine of Hippo, p. 296.

• Every sinful act is another cord woven into that mighty cable of habit, which binds the spirit to the throne of darkness.
  • David Thomas, p. 296.

• The diminutive chains of habit are seldom heavy enough to be felt, till they are too strong to be broken.
  • Samuel Johnson, p. 296.

Unsourced

• Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits.
  • Mark Twain

• Habits are soon assumed; but when we strive to strip them off, 'tis being flayed alive.
  • Cowper

• The law of the harvest is to reap more than you sow. Sow an act, and you reap a habit; sow a habit, and you reap a character; sow a character, and you reap a destiny.
  • Charles Reade, G. D. Boardman

• A single bad habit will mar an otherwise faultless character, as an ink drop soileth the pure white page.
  • Hosea Ballou

• Habits are like the wrinkles on a man's brow; if you will smooth out the one, I will smooth out the other.
  • H. W. Shaw

• Habit is ten times nature.
  • Wellington

• Habit is the most imperious of all masters.
  • Johann Wolfgang Goethe

• I will govern my life and my thoughts as if the whole world were to see the one and to read the other; for what does it signify to make anything a secret to my neighbor, when to God (who is the searcher of our hearts) all our privacies are open?
  • Seneca

• The will that yields the first time with some reluctance does so the second time with less hesitation, and the third time with none at all, until presently the habit is adopted.
  • Henry Giles

• It is almost as difficult to make a man unlearn his errors as his knowledge.
  • Colton

• Habits, though in their commencement like the filmy line of the spider, trembling at every breeze, may in the end prove as links of tempered steel, binding a deathless being to eternal felicity or woe.
  • Lydia Sigourney

• I will be a slave to no habit; therefore farewell tobacco.
  • Hosea Ballou

• First, we make our habits, then our habits make us.
  • Charles C. Noble