habits

I am deep in my willed habits. From the outside, I suppose I look like an unoccupied house with one unconvincing night-light left on. Any burglar could look through my curtains and conclude I am empty. But he would be mistaken. Under that one light unstirred by movement or shadows there is a man at work, and as long as I am at work I am not a candidate for Menlo Park, or that terminal facility they cynically call a convalescent hospital, or a pine box. My habits and the unchanging season sustain me. Evil is what questions and disrupts.

Strange how reluctant I was to acknowledge that control of my fate lay beyond my own conscious will. Habit of a lifetime, I suppose.

How to win in life:1 work hard 2 complain less 3 listen more 4 try, learn, grow5 don't let people tell you it cant be done6 make no excuses

You got to get out into the field. Secondhand information in this world only takes you so far.

Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread or if they even, like the writer of the letter to the New Statesman, saved on fuel and ate their carrots raw? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn't. Here the tendency of which I spoke at the end of the last chapter comes into play. When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don't want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit 'tasty'. There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you.

Chronic problems tend to come from chronic habits.

Love your body. Exercise for 10-15 minutes daily.

First we form habits, then they form us.

Good habits are hard to form and easy to live with. Bad habits are easy to form and hard to live with. Pay attention. Be aware . If we don't consciously form good ones, we will unconsciously form bad ones.

You and I have the decision to decide what we are going to be with our life! Or we can let the paradigm control us and march along in lockstep type fashion.

Good habits are the key to all success. Bad habits are the unlocked door to failure.

I should pursue only those habits that would make me feel freer and stronger.

You can't make yourself feel positive, but you can choose how to act, and if you choose right, it builds your confidence.

When people become prisoners of daily habits and happen to be hostages of choices, which they made in the past, but which they finally do not actually want, they experience the need to abandon their corporeal prison at a certain time in life. ( "Corporeal prison" )

Bad habits are like having a sumo wrestler in the back of your canoe rowing the opposite direction.

The best thinking says 'the self' is a fiction (I have a piece about that), yet it's a fiction that we all believe, our most intimate experience. Maybe it's nothing more than our tendency to repeat. Maybe we repeat because when we do, we recognize the behavior and the familiarity is comforting. So the self is just the consolation of our tendencies.

Trying to change old habits is like fighting a war in your head__ draining and exhausting skirmish that makes you wonder at your chance of survival.

You don't set out to build a wall. You don't say: 'I'm going to build the biggest, baddest, greatest wall that's ever been built.' You say, "I'm going to lay this brick as perfectly as a brick can be laid. You do that every single day. And soon you have the greatest wall that's ever been built." - Will Smith