Rupert Sheldrake Quotes

Culture exists and evolves to relegate to habit categories of interactions the constant conscious reference to which would make human interaction impossible.

Then one day, we’ll put the reward in the old place, and put in the rat, and, by golloy, the old habit will rememerge right away. habits never really disappear. They’re encoded into the sturctures of our brain, and that’s a huge advantage for us, because it would be awful if we had to relearn how to drive after every vacation. The problem is that your brain can’t tell the difference between bad and good habits, and so if you have a bad one, it’s always lurking there, waiting for the right cues and rewards.

The reasons and purposes for habits are always lies that are added only after some people begin to attack these habits and to ask for reasons and purposes. At this point the conservatives of all ages are thoroughly dishonest: they add lies.

Every habit makes our hand more witty and our wit less handy.

Good manners come, as we say, from good breeding or rather are good breeding; and breeding is acquired by habitual action, in response to habitual stimuli, not by conveying information.

We build our character from the bricks of habit we pile up day by day.

Good habits are as addictive as bad habits, and a lot more rewarding.

Nothing is stronger than habit.

There is nothing more innately human than the tendency to transmute what has become customary into what has been divinely ordained.

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

Habit in most cases hardens and encrusts by taking away the keener edge of our sensations: but does it not in others quicken and refine, by giving a mechanical facility and by engrafting an acquired sense?

Habit is the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit.

I'm doing a lot of speaking and talking about habits, which is this subject that obsesses me. That's a lot of fun.

In truth, the only difference between those who have failed and those who have succeeded lies in the difference of their habits. Good habits are the key to all success. Bad habits are the unlocked door to failure. Thus, the first law I will obey, which precedeth all others is - I will form good habits and become their slave.

The fixity of a habit is generally in direct proportion to its absurdity.

For that which has become habitual, becomes as it were natural.

What we believe as human nature in actuality is human habit.

A large part of our attitude toward things is conditioned by opinions and emotions which we unconsciously absorb as children from our environment. In other words, it is tradition—besides inherited aptitudes and qualities—which makes us what we are. We but rarely reflect how relatively small as compared with the powerful influence of tradition is the influence of our conscious thought upon our conduct and convictions.

One study says that 90 percent of our everyday behavior is based on our habits. . . That means how we treat people, how we spend our money, what we watch, what we listen to - 90 percent of the time, we're on autopilot. We do what we've always done.

Probably 90 percent of our life decisions are powered by the twin engines of inertia and laziness.

Habit is, to weak minds, a species of moral predestination, from which they have no power to escape.

Our volitional habits depend, then, first, on what the stock of ideas is which we have; and, second, on the habitual coupling of the several ideas with action or inaction respectively.

See what a person is doing every day, day after day, and you'll know who that person is and what he or she is becoming.

If only I had discipline, but alas, it is only an obsessive-compulsive trait and the beauty of habit that causes me to return again and again to my work.

We make our customs lightly; once made, like our sins, they grip us in bands of steel; we become the creatures of our creation.