List of Famous Habit Quotes in English

Here are some famous quotes about habits, offering insights into how habits shape our lives, success, and personal growth:

1. "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit." – Aristotle

  • Meaning: Aristotle emphasizes that success and excellence are not one-time achievements but the result of consistent effort and behavior. The habits we form define who we are and how we succeed, meaning that to achieve greatness, we must cultivate great habits.

2. "Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken." – Warren Buffett

  • Meaning: Buffett warns that habits, whether good or bad, develop gradually and unnoticed until they become so ingrained that they are difficult to change. This highlights the importance of being mindful of our habits before they become too strong to break.

3. "The secret of your future is hidden in your daily routine." – Mike Murdock

  • Meaning: Murdock suggests that our future success or failure is determined by the small, consistent actions we take each day. By creating positive habits, we set the foundation for future achievements and a successful life.

4. "First we make our habits, then our habits make us." – John Dryden

  • Meaning: Dryden points out the reciprocal relationship between habits and identity. Initially, we choose our habits, but over time, those habits shape our character and actions, making us who we are.

5. "The difference between an amateur and a professional is in their habits. An amateur has amateur habits. A professional has professional habits." – Steven Pressfield

  • Meaning: Pressfield highlights that success in any field comes down to the habits we cultivate. Professionals develop disciplined, focused habits that allow them to perform consistently at a high level, whereas amateurs often lack this structure.

6. "Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going." – Jim Rohn

  • Meaning: Rohn explains that while motivation can spark action, it is habit that sustains it. Motivation may be fleeting, but consistent habits create lasting change and success.

7. "Successful people are simply those with successful habits." – Brian Tracy

  • Meaning: Tracy argues that the key to success lies in cultivating the right habits. By developing positive, productive habits, individuals set themselves up for long-term success and achievement.

8. "Good habits formed at youth make all the difference." – Aristotle

  • Meaning: Aristotle stresses the importance of forming good habits early in life. Habits learned in youth often carry through to adulthood, playing a crucial role in shaping one’s future.

9. "Your habits will determine your future." – Jack Canfield

  • Meaning: Canfield emphasizes that our future outcomes are the direct result of the habits we practice daily. Success, health, and happiness are all shaped by the habits we cultivate.

10. "The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken." – Samuel Johnson

  • Meaning: Similar to Warren Buffett’s version, Johnson warns that habits start subtly but eventually become powerful forces in our lives, making it harder to change them the longer they persist.

11. "You’ll never change your life until you change something you do daily. The secret of your success is found in your daily routine." – John C. Maxwell

  • Meaning: Maxwell highlights the importance of daily habits in shaping long-term success. By changing small, everyday actions, we can transform our lives in significant ways.

12. "Habit is either the best of servants or the worst of masters." – Nathaniel Emmons

  • Meaning: Emmons explains that habits can either serve us well or control us negatively, depending on whether they are good or bad. Good habits help us achieve success, while bad habits can trap us in destructive patterns.

13. "The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken." – Samuel Johnson

  • Meaning: Johnson reflects on how habits, good or bad, can be hard to notice when they're first formed, but over time, they grow strong enough to govern our behavior. This serves as a warning to carefully choose the habits we form.

14. "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." – Aristotle

  • Meaning: Aristotle delves into the concept that virtues and excellence are products of habit. Consistently doing the right thing, over time, leads to the development of good character and excellence.

15. "Your net worth to the world is usually determined by what remains after your bad habits are subtracted from your good ones." – Benjamin Franklin

  • Meaning: Franklin suggests that one’s value to society is a result of the balance between good and bad habits. Cultivating more good habits than bad makes you a more valuable and effective person in the world.

16. "We become what we repeatedly do." – Sean Covey

  • Meaning: Covey stresses that our identity is shaped by our habits. What we do on a regular basis ultimately determines who we become, emphasizing the importance of cultivating positive, productive habits.

17. "The second half of a man’s life is made up of nothing but the habits he has acquired during the first half." – Fyodor Dostoevsky

  • Meaning: Dostoevsky highlights how the habits formed early in life shape the latter half of a person’s life. Habits developed over time become ingrained and often define one’s lifestyle and behavior as they grow older.

18. "Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement." – James Clear

  • Meaning: Clear explains that, just as compound interest grows over time, small habits accumulate and lead to significant personal growth and improvement over time. Positive habits may seem small at first but have a profound impact on long-term success.

19. "Sow a thought and you reap an action; 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

  • Meaning: Reade explains the progression from thoughts to destiny, showing how small actions can snowball into life-defining habits and ultimately shape one's future.

20. "Habits are the invisible architecture of daily life." – Gretchen Rubin

  • Meaning: Rubin emphasizes that habits, although often unnoticed, form the structure of our everyday existence. They quietly shape how we spend our time, energy, and resources, influencing our outcomes without our constant awareness.

These quotes highlight the powerful role that habits play in shaping our lives, success, and character. They stress the importance of cultivating positive habits and being mindful of the ones we form, as they ultimately define who we become.

 

How use doth breed a habit in a man!

- William Shakespeare Quotes

Once you learn to quit, it becomes a habit.

- Vince Lombardi

Nothing is stronger than habit.

- Habit Quotes by Ovid

As a twig is bent the tree inclines.

- Virgil

Habits change into character.

- Publius Ovidius Naso Ovid

How use doth breed a habit in a man!

- William Shakespeare

Powerful indeed is the empire of habit.

- Publilius Syrus

Good habits result from resisting temptation.

- Habit Quotes by Indian Proverb

A large part of virtue consists in good habits.

- Barbara Paley

Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.

- Henry Adams

A man’s fortune has its form given to it by his habits.

- Anonymous

Heartily know, When half-gods go, The gods arrive.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.

- Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits.

- Mark Twain

A nail is driven out by another nail. Habit is overcome by habit.

- Desiderius Erasmus

Divide each difficulty into as many parts as necessary to resolve it.

- Rene Descartes

Small habits well pursued betimes May reach the dignity of crimes.

- Hannah More

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

- Habit Quotes by Errol Flynn

Curious things, habits. People themselves never knew they had them. 

- Habit Quotes by Agatha Christie

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.

- Aristotle

Men acquire a particular quality by constantly acting in a particular way.

- Anonymous

Bad habits are like a comfortable bed, easy to get into, but hard to get out of.

- Anonymous

All habits gather by unseen degrees, As brooks make rivers, rivers run to seas.

- John Dryden

Every woman should eat for the long run so she can manage the short stops of crisis.

- Jane Fonda

First we form habits, then they form us. Conquer your bad habits or they will conquer you.

- Rob Gilbert

A habit cannot be tossed out the window; it must be coaxed down the stairs a step at a time.

- Mark Twain

You leave old habits behind by starting out with the thought, 'I release the need for this in my life'.

Dr. Wayne W. Dyer

The unfortunate thing about this world is that good habits are so much easier to give up than bad ones.

- William Somerset Maugham

No matter how old you get, if you can keep the desire to be creative, you're keeping the man-child alive.

- John Cassavetes

Habit is habit and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time.

- Habit Quotes by Mark Twain

Your net worth to the world is usually determined by what remains after your bad habits are subtracted from your good ones.

- Benjamin Franklin

Thoughts lead on to purposes; purposes go forth in action; actions form habits; habits decide character; and character fixes our destiny.

- Tryon Edwards

It seems, in fact, as though the second half of a man’s life is made up of nothing but the habits he has accumulated during the first half.

- Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky

Action on the move creates its own route, creates to a very great extent the conditions under which it is to be fulfilled and thus baffles all calculation.

- Henri Bergson

I never could have done what I have done without the habits of punctuality, order, and diligence, without the determination to concentrate myself on one subject at a time.

- Charles Dickens

Moral habits, induced by public practices, are far quicker in making their way into men’s private lives, than the failings and faults of individuals are in infecting the city at large.

- Plutarch

Any act often repeated soon forms a habit; and habit allowed, steadily gains in strength. At first it may be but as the spider's web, easily broken through, but if not resisted it soon binds us with chains of steel.

- Tyron Edwards

We are what we think; as we desire so do we become! By our thoughts, desires, and habits, we either ascend to the full divine dignity of our nature, or we descend to suffer and learn.

- J. Todd Ferrier

What a curious phenomenon it is that you can get men to die for the liberty of the world who will not make the little sacrifice that is needed to free themselves from their own individual bondage.

- Bruce Barton

Power is the faculty or capacity to act, the strength and potency to accomplish something. It is the vital energy to make choices and decisions. It also includes the capacity to overcome deeply embedded habits and to cultivate higher, more effective ones.

- Stephen R. Covey

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

Those who have attained things worth having in this world have worked while others idled, have persevered when others gave up in despair, have practiced early in life the valuable habits of self-denial, industry, and singleness of purpose. As a result, they enjoy in later life the success so often erroneously attributed to good luck.

- Grenville Kleiser

We're worn into grooves by Time by our habits. In the end, these grooves are going to show whether we've been second rate or champions, each in his way in dispatching the affairs of every day. By choosing our habits, we determine the grooves into which Time will wear us; and these are grooves that enrich our lives and make for ease of mind, peace, happiness achievement.

- Frank B. Gilberth

It is hard to let old beliefs go. They are familiar. We are comfortable with them and have spent years building systems and developing habits that depend on them. Like a man who has worn eyeglasses so long that he forgets he has them on, we forget that the world looks to us the way it does because we have become used to seeing it that way through a particular set of lenses. Today, however, we need new lenses. And we need to throw the old ones away.

- Kenich Ohmae

The long span of the bridge of your life is supported by countless cables called habits, attitudes, and desires. What you do in life depends upon what you are and what you want. What you get from life depends upon how much you want it, how much you are willing to work and plan and cooperate and use your resources. The long span of the bridge of your life is supported by countless cables that you are spinning now, and that is why today is such an important day. Make the cables strong!

- L.G. Elliott

In one sense the whole process of development consists of the formation of habits; for knowledge itself, and the powers of thought, as well as the higher elements in the will, all depend upon the establishment of fixed ways of reacting to given stimuli. Consequently, the general laws of habituation underlie the whole of education. But the term habit is more commonly restricted to those established reactions that act with little or no participation of consciousness, or, in other words, mechanically or automatically. Such habits as these begin to form very early, and constitute a kind of supporting framework for the higher elements of character.

- Edward O. Sisson

The secret of the whole matter is that a habit is not the mere tendency to repeat a certain act, nor is it established by the mere repetition of the act. Habit is a fixed tendency to react or respond in a certain way to a given stimulus; and the formation of habit always involves the two elements, the stimulus and the response or reaction. The indolent lad goes to school not in response to any stimulus in the school itself, but to the pressure of his father's will; when that stimulus is absent, the reaction as a matter of course does not occur.

- Edward O. Sisson