By nature, we are all creatures of habit.
We instinctively adopt familiar routines for most activities.
We eat about the same number of meals each day -
at more or less the same times.
We have a regular pattern of sleeping -
unless it is perturbed by illness or shift work.
Most everything we do is habitual.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
Habit and routine have an unbelievable power to waste and destroy.
- Henri de Lubac
From the way most people live,
one would never guess that humans are beings of free will.
Repetition can be a choice, but often it isn't.
The athlete or pianist who practices the same routine
day after day, year after year, has their eye on a goal.
The unending repetition is a conscious choice
in the pursuit of a life dream.
But what about the sameness of most lives?
Observe the morning commute, the after-work drink,
the Sunday football game or religious service -
how many of those people are consciously following their dream,
training their mind, body, and spirit through that daily repetition?
And how many are mindlessly slogging through each day
out of habit and boredom?
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
Habits age men before their time.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
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Thank you for joining me on this journey we call life,
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
Feeling sorry for yourself, and your present condition,
is not only a waste of energy
but the worst habit you could possibly have.
- Dale Carnegie
We first make our habits, then our habits make us.
- John Dryden
The most dangerous phrase in the language is,
"We've always done it this way."
- Grace Hopper
Who has fully realized that history
is not contained in thick books
but lives in our very blood?
- Carl Jung
If you do not change direction,
you may end up where you are heading.
- Lao Tzu
The chains of habit are too weak to be felt
until they are too strong to be broken.
- Samuel Johnson
We hardly ever realize that we can
cut anything out of our lives,
anytime, in the blink of an eye.
- Carlos Castaneda
Successful people are simply those with successful habits.
- Brian Tracy
If we want to direct our lives,
we must take control of our consistent actions.
It's not what we do once in a while that shapes our lives,
but what we do consistently.
- Anthony Robbins
What you don't do daily, you probably won't do weekly either.
What you make a habit of putting-off
just keeps getting pushed away again and again.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
What we call human nature in actuality is human habit.
- Jewel
Correcting bad habits cannot be done
by forbidding or punishment.
- Robert Baden-Powell (the founder of scouting)
Whenever you are angry, be assured that
it is not only a present evil,
but that you have increased a habit.
- Epictetus
Every generation laughs at the old fashions,
but follows religiously the new.
- Henry David Thoreau
Love that does not renew itself every day
becomes a habit and in turn a slavery.
- Khalil Gibran
We are what we repeatedly do.
Excellence then is not an act, but a habit.
- Will Durant (commonly attributed to Aristotle)
We disrespect ourselves and our free-will
whenever we say that we NEED to do something.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
Choose your Habits, Choose your Life.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
What is it about sameness that so draws me,
and how could I begin to have
that same kind of attraction to change?
- Mary Anne Radmacher
There is a fine line between
the perseverance of the courageous tortoise
and the habit of the stubborn donkey.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
Fear is not in the habit of speaking truth.
- Publius Cornelius Tacitus
Ninety-nine percent of the failures
come from people who have the habit of making excuses.
- George Washington Carver
The habit of persistence is the habit of victory.
- Herbert Kaufman
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
Habit is habit,
and not to be flung out of the window by any man,
but coaxed down-stairs a step at a time.
- Mark Twain
We are addicted to being the way we are
- don Miguel Ruiz
Most of us are prisoners of habit,
and don't even notice that we do the same things,
think the same things, want the same things each day -
mostly without conscious thought.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
Get the habit of analysis -
analysis will in time enable synthesis
to become your habit of mind.
- Frank Lloyd Wright
During his training, a baseball player strives
to make each swing better than the last.
The repetition of a faulty swing would be worse than useless.
It would ingrain bad habits.
The same is true of emotional responses.
If we allow ourselves to continue to have the same angry responses,
we just entrench our anger habit.
But if we strive - through consciousness, visualization, and coaching -
to moderate our anger response,
over time, we can train ourselves to respond
to events as we choose - without anger.
You can't magically be free from anger tomorrow,
but you can put yourself on your own training program
that will reduce the frequency and intensity
of your anger response day by day, year by year.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
There is a fine line between perseverance and insanity.
At what point have you tried your best,
and it's time to do something different?
It's a balance - a paradox.
If you get in the habit of giving up
as soon as something gets difficult,
your life won't work,
but if you keep tilting at windmills -
madly trying the same thing again and again,
your life also won't work.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
There is nothing more dreadful than the habit of doubt.
Doubt separates people.
It is a poison that disintegrates
friendships and breaks up pleasant relations.
It is a thorn that irritates and hurts;
it is a sword that kills.
- The Buddha
Unless we form the habit of going to the Bible
in bright moments as well as in trouble,
we cannot fully respond to its consolations
because we lack equilibrium between light and darkness.
- Helen Keller
Procrastination is the bad habit of putting off
until the day after tomorrow what should
have been done the day before yesterday.
- Napoleon Hill
I made no resolutions for the New Year.
The habit of making plans, of criticizing, sanctioning
and molding my life, is too much of a daily event for me.
- Anais Nin
I like to talk about a thing I call a "practiced pause."
Just a few moments of pausing allows me
to consider a circumstance and take stock
of what the best direction might be.
Reactions tend to rise from habit and unconsidered action.
A Response is considered and thoughtful.
My actions are my own and I am, singularly,
responsible for what I see, say, feel and exert.
- Mary Anne Radmacher
Habits are cobwebs at first, cables at last.
- Chinese proverb
Any man who reads too much
and uses his own brain too little
falls into lazy habits of thinking.
- Albert Einstein
Bad habits are like a comfortable bed,
easy to get into, but hard to get out of.
- Proverb
It is easier to prevent bad habits than to break them.
- Benjamin Franklin
You are defined by your habits - choose well.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
Recognize that "suffering is optional," and develop daily habits
that support living a joyful and productive life.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
You will always have habits -
things you do regularly and without conscious thought -
but you do have the ability to CHOOSE your habits.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
Before you can forgive others,
you must be a person whose forgiveness matters.
Before you can have gratitude for your life,
you must believe that your life has value.
Before your choices have value,
you must feel that you yourself have value.
Before you can dream a great dream for your future,
you have to believe that your future matters.
Before you can build positive habits of resolve and commitment,
before you can begin to live into the Japanese proverb,
"Fall seven times, stand up eight,"
you must believe that your life matters.
Before you can celebrate your life, you must Honor it.
And, before you can feel unity with,
and Honor toward, Spirit and all creation,
you must Honor yourself to feel worthy of that unity.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
Watch your thoughts, for they become words.
Watch your words, for they become actions.
Watch your actions, for they become habits.
Watch your habits, for they become character.
Watch your character, for it becomes your destiny.
- Anonymous
The awareness that health is dependent
upon habits that we control
makes us the first generation in history
that to a large extent determines its own destiny.
- Jimmy Carter
Why does a woman work ten years to change a man's habits
and then complain that he's not the man she married?
- Barbra Streisand
Reading, after a certain age,
diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits.
Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little
falls into lazy habits of thinking.
- Albert Einstein
Man is descended from a hairy, tailed quadruped,
probably arboreal in its habits.
- Charles Darwin
Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits.
- Mark Twain
I recognize this in my writing process.
A consistent writing structure opens the door to amazing insights.
I recognize the truth of this in my daily habits.
When I set my keys in the place
I, with practice, always set my keys...
I do not lose them.
In many instances an ordered external structure
can be an invitation for an extraordinarily unfettered,
creative and unbounded inner structure.
- Mary Anne Radmacher
Truth is by nature self-evident.
As soon as you remove the cobwebs of ignorance
that surround it, it shines clear.
- Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi
When a thing is funny, search it for a hidden truth.
- George Bernard Shaw
The words of truth are always paradoxical.
- Lao Tzu
Keep the company of those who seek the truth;
run from those who have found it.
- V�clav Havel
The water in a vessel is sparkling;
the water in the sea is dark.
The small truth has words which are clear;
the great truth has great silence.
- Rabindranath Tagore
The truth. It is a beautiful and terrible thing,
and should be treated with caution.
- J. K. Rowling
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person.
Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
- Oscar Wilde
Use the power of your word
in the direction of truth and love.
- don Miguel Ruiz
Our actions are constrained by fear of reprisal,
but our dreams reveal our true character.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
Truth is not defined by
how many people believe something.
Ask. Question. Think.
Decide - for yourself.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
Mistakes are, after all, the foundations of truth,
and if a man does not know what a thing is,
it is at least an increase in knowledge
if he knows what it is not.
- Carl Jung
Beyond a doubt, truth bears the same relation
to falsehood as light to darkness.
- Leonardo da Vinci
All truth passes through three stages:
First, it is ridiculed;
Second, it is violently opposed;
Third, it is accepted as self-evident.
- Arthur Schopenhauer
I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie.
I believe it is better to be free than to be a slave.
And I believe it is better to know than to be ignorant.
- H.L. Mencken
Three things cannot be long hidden:
the sun, the moon, and the truth.
- The Buddha
Losing an illusion makes you wiser than finding a truth.
- Ludwig Boerne
Anyone who doesn't take truth seriously in small matters
cannot be trusted in large ones either.
- Albert Einstein
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May the world be kind to you, and may your own thoughts be gentle upon yourself.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
All materials & writings are copyright © Jonathan Lockwood Huie, except for quotes and other specifically identified material which belong to their respective copyright holders if applicable.
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