Habits

 

My problem lies in reconciling my gross habits with my net income.

– Errol Flynn

 

The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.

– Samuel Johnson

 

Contemporary man has rationalized the myths, but he has not been able to destroy them.

– Octavio Paz

 

Habit is stronger than reason.

– George Santayana

 

Few people have ever seriously wished to be exclusively rational. The good life which most desire is a life warmed by passions and touched with that ceremonial grace which is impossible without some affectionate loyalty to traditional forms and ceremonies.

– Joseph Wood Krutch

 

Innumerable are the illusions and legerdemain tricks of custom: but of all these, perhaps the cleverest is custom’s knack of persuading us that the miraculous, by simple repetition, ceases to be miraculous.

Thomas Carlyle

 

He who does anything because it is the custom, makes no choice.

– John Stuart Mill

 

The way of the world is to praise dead saints and persecute living ones.

– Nathaniel Howe

 

The main dangers in this life are the people who want to change everything – or nothing.

– Lady Astor

 

When you are accustomed to anything, you are estranged from it.

– George Cabot Lodge

 

Habituation is a falling asleep or fatiguing of the sense of time, which explains why young years pass slowly, while later life flings itself faster and faster upon its course.

– Thomas Mann

 

Habits are at first cobwebs, then cables.

– Spanish proverb

 

Have a place for everything, and keep the thing somewheres else. That is not advice, it is merely custom.

– Mark Twain

 

There is nothing sacred about convention; there is nothing sacred about primitive passions or whims; but the fact that a convention exists indicates that a way of living has been devised capable of maintaining itself.

– George Santayana

 

Tradition does not mean that the living are dead, it means that the dead are living.

– Harold Macmillan

 

Laws are never as effective as habits.

– Adlai Stevenson