Behavioral Inertia Quotes

The easier it is to do something, the harder it is to change the way you do it.

In the most important areas, as individuals and countries, we don't change our behavior until we have our backs to the wall.

Our problem is not the lack of knowing; it is the lack of doing. Most people know far more than they think they do

Churchgoers in America are notorious for jumping into movements, even ideas that are hard to listen to. But when they actually have to change their lifestyle and do something about it, it rarely translates into action.

We live in an age of 'urge'. We do nothing till somebody shoves us.

We'll look for almost any reason not to change our attitudes; the inertia of the established order is powerful. If we can think of a plausible, or even implausible, reason to discount environmental warnings, we will.

One might call habit a moral friction: something that prevents the mind from gliding over things but connects it with them and makes it hard for it to free itself from them.

I like less the story that a frog if put in cold water will not bestir itself if that water is heated up slowly and gradually and will in the end let itself be killed, boiled alive, too comfortable with continuity to realize that continuous change at some point may become intolerable and demand a change in behaviour.

It is impossible, or not easy, to alter by argument what has long been absorbed by habit

I think the most common meme is that it's too difficult to change. It's too risky to change. My nature doesn't allow me to change.

I have a resistance to change in things that I feel comfortable with and that I'm used to.

In every age of transition men are never so firmly bound to one way of life as when they are about to abandon it.

For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts.

We are shaping the world faster than we can change ourselves, and we are applying to the present the habits of the past.

here's a payoff for everyone. The reason we hang on to self-defeating behaviors is because it's easier not to take responsibility.

While some of us act without thinking, too many of us think without acting.

Behavior runs in deep channels that were cut during early childhood, and it is very difficult to alter them. In order to change a deeply ingrained pattern, you have to build a sturdy dam, dig another canal and reroute the river in the new direction. That effort is rarely successful over the long haul.