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

When we scratch the wound and give into our addictions we do not allow the wound to heal.

- Pema Chodron

Perhaps the biggest tragedy of our lives is that freedom is possible, yet we can pass our years trapped in the same old patterns.

- Tara Brach

Things start out as hopes and end up as habits.

- Lillian Hellman

We imagine that we want to escape our selfish and commonplace existence, but we cling desperately to our chains.

- Anne Sullivan

[O]ur lives are like soap operas. We can go for months and not tune into them, then six months later we look in and the same stuff is going on.

- Jane Wagner

It doesn't matter how long we may have been stuck in a sense of our limitations. If we go into a darkened room and turn on the light, it doesn't matter if the room has been dark for a day, a week, or ten thousand years -- we turn on the light and it is illuminated. Once we control our capacity for love and happiness, the light has been turned on.

- Sharon Salzberg

Love is an act of endless forgiveness, a tender look which becomes a habit.

- Peter Ustinov

This is a very important practice. Live your daily life in a way that you never lose yourself. When you are carried away with your worries, fears, cravings, anger, and desire, you run away from yourself and you lose yourself. The practice is always to go back to oneself.

- Thich Nhat Hanh

A thoroughly good relationship with ourselves results in being still, which doesn't mean we don't run and jump and dance about. It means there's no compulsiveness. We don't overwork, overeat, oversmoke, overseduce. In short, we begin to stop causing harm.

- Pema Chodron

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

- Aristotle

But actions originally prompted by conscious intelligence may grow so automatic by dint of habit as to be apparently unconsciously performed. Standing, walking, buttoning and unbuttoning, piano-playing, talking, even saying one's prayers, may be done when the mind is absorbed in other things. The performances of animal instinct seem semi-automatic, and the reflex acts of self-preservation certainly are so. Yet they resemble intelligent acts in bringing about the same ends at which the animals' consciousness, on other occasions, deliberately aims.

- William James

He who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and third time, till at length it becomes habitual.

- Thomas Jefferson

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.

- Annie Dillard

Moral excellence comes about as a result of habit. We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.

- Aristotle

If you have always done it that way, it is probably wrong.

- Charles Kettering

To cease smoking is the easiest thing I ever did; I ought to know because I've done it a thousand times.

- Mark Twain

Habits are first cobwebs, then cables.

- Spanish proverb

Habits of thought persist through the centuries; and while a healthy brain may reject the doctrine it no longer believes, it will continue to feel the same sentiments formerly associated with that doctrine.

- Charlotte Perkins Gilman

If you for specimens should hunt
With trunks behind and tails in front,
That hunt would occupy you long
The force of habit is so strong.

- A. E. Housman

Have a place for everything and keep the thing somewhere else; this is not advice, it is merely custom.

- Mark Twain