Breaking old habits Quotes

You can't suddenly say, 'I want a brand new habit tomorrow,' and expect it to be easy and effortless.

Whatever I know how to do, I've already done. Therefore I must always do what I do not know how to do.

A person cannot coast along in old destructive habits year after year and accept whatever comes along. A person must stand up on her own two legs and walk. Get off the bus and go get on another. Climb out of the ditch and cross the road. Find the road that s where you want to go. ... The only sermon that counts is the one that is formed by our actions. She would quit drinking and thereby show Kyle life is what you make it. A person can grab hold of her life and change things for the better. This happens all the time. We are not chips of wood drifting down the stream of time. We have oars.

The only way to permanently install a new habit is to direct so much energy toward it that the old one slips away like an unwelcome house guest.

To Unlearn is as hard as to Learn

Well, wherever you go, whatever you do, you're still you. You can change your surroundings, start a new life, but you'll always fall into the same old patterns, make the same kind of friends, commit the same mistakes. The thing you need to change is yourself.

When I first moved to Austin in January of 2000, I went out drinking and smoking every single night for a year. And it was really fun at first, but then I started to feel kind of weird because, before I moved here, I had a vision of myself becoming a new person once I lived in Austin. I just hadn't realized that person might be Nick Nolte.

We spend a lot of time teaching leaders what to do. We don't spend enough time teaching leaders what to stop. Half the leaders I have met don't need to learn what to do. They need to learn what to stop

Few things are as foolish as hoping old behaviors will somehow present new results.

There is always an inertia to be overcome in striking out a new line of conduct – not more in ourselves, it seems, than in circumscribing events, which appear as if leagued together to allow no novelties in the way of amelioration.