On Habit

   We first make our habits then our habits make us. 




   Habit is a cable.  We weave a thread of it every day, and at 
   last we cannot break it. 

                                                        H. Mann 



   Habit is the deepest law of human nature. 
            
                                               Carlyle 




   Habit is either the best of servants or the worst of masters. 

                                                        Emmons 



   The chains of habit are generally too small to be felt until 
   they are too strong to be broken. 
                                                        Johnson 




   When we have practiced good actions awhile they become easy;  
   when they are easy we take pleasure in them;  when they please 
   us we do them frequently;  and then, by frequency of act, they 
   grow into a habit. 
                                                        Tillotson 




   We are all the time following the influences which will 
   presently be our rulers;  We are making our own destiny.  We 
   are choosing our habits, our associates, our traits, our homes.  
   In time these acquire a power over us which enslaves our will, 
   and from them we neither will nor can break loose. 

                                                    H. L. Wayland 




   Bad habits are as infectious by example as the plague itself is 
   by contact. 
                                                        Fielding 



   In early childhood you may lay the foundation of poverty or 
   riches, industry or idleness, good or evil, by the habits to 
   which you train your children.  Teach them right habits then 
   and their future life is safe. 

   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 H. Sigourney 



   Habit is the child of impulse.  There is in human life the 
   period of impulse, when habit is nothing;  and there is the 
   period of habit, when impulse is nothing.  Young persons are 
   creatures of impulse;  old persons are creatures of habit.  
   Almost every thing is impulse with a small child, and nothing 
   can be called habit;  almost everything is habit in the second 
   childhood of old age, and there is very little that can be 
   called impulse.
                                                  G. B. Cheever 



   Sow an act and you reap a habit;  sow a habit and you reap a 
   character;  sow a character and you reap a destiny. 

                                                  G. D. Boardman 




   A large part of Christian virtue consists in good habits. 

                                                        Paley 



   If we would know who is the most degraded and wretched of human 
   beings, look for a man who has practiced a vice so long that he 
   curses it and yet clings to it;  that he pursues it because he 
   feels a great law of his nature driving him on toward it;  but 
   reaching it, knows that it will gnaw his heart, and make him 
   roll himself in the dust with anguish.  Habit, to which all of 
   us are more or less slaves. 

                                                        Fontaine 




   Habits are to the soul what the veins and arteries are to the 
   blood, the courses in which it moves. 

                                                  Horace Bushnell 




   Habit, if not resisted, soon becomes necessity. 

                                                        Augustine 





   I trust everything, under God, to habit, upon which, in all 
   ages, the lawgiver as well as the schoolmaster has mainly 
   placed his reliance;  habit which makes everything easy, and 
   casts all difficulties upon the deviation from the wonted 
   course.  Make sobriety a habit, and intemperence will be 
   hateful and hard;  make prudence a habit, and reckless 
   profligacy will be as contrary to the nature of a child, grown 
   to an adult, as the most atrocious crimes are to your 
   lordships.  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 an element in which he cannot breathe, as of 
   lying, or cheating, or stealing. 

                                                        Brougham