Seneca the Younger Quotes

The tendency is to keep doing things the way you have done them.

We are asleep with compasses in our hands.

When people are used to you doing something, they want you to stay in that lane.

I can't imagine my life any other way than it's been.

Everything becomes too normal after a while.

Tradition is laziness.

We always know which is the best road to follow, but we follow only the road that we have become accustomed to.

Everything was leveled, there were no extremes of joy or sorrow any more but only habit, routine, ancient family names and rites and customs, slow careful old people moving cautiously around furniture that had sat in the same positions for fifty years.

The only thing that should astonish us is that anything can yet astonish us.

Its matter was not new to me, but was presented in a new aspect. It shook me in my habit - the habit of nine-tenths of the world - of believing that all was right about me, because I was used to it.

Habit with him was all the test of truth; It must be right: I've done it from my youth.

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.

It's hard to get lost if you don't know where you're going.

Habit had made the custom.

A man who's active and incisive can yet keep nail-care much in mind: why fight what's known to be decisive? Custom is despot of mankind.

No one should let themselves get used to anything.

Habit creates the appearance of justice; progress has no greater enemy than habit.

The other producer of old age is habit: the deathly process of doing the same thing in the same way at the same hour day after day, first from carelessness, then from inclination, at last from cowardice or inertia. Luckily the inconsequent life is not the only alternative; for caprice is as ruinous as routine. Habit is necessary; it is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive.

There's something desirable about anything you're used to as opposed to something you're not.

You can get used to eating breakfast with a man in a fedora. You can get used to anything, my mother was in the habit of saying.

A learned man came to me once. He said, "I know the way, -- come." And I was overjoyed at this. Together we hastened. Soon, too soon, were we Where my eyes were useless, And I knew not the ways of my feet. I clung to the hand of my friend; But at last he cried, "I am lost.

Marriage must perforce fight against the all-devouring monster of habit.

Habituation puts to sleep the eye of our judgment.

When you do not change up a lot, people may know you a lot better than they should.

What though the sea be calm? trust to the shore, Ships have been drown'd, where late they danc'd before.