Pastoral Resources

My writing has to support more than my research habit, but I love to curl up with a book about some dusty corner of history.

They have not always elected the best leaders, particularly after a long period in which they have not used this facility of free election. You tend to lose the habit.

Chaos often breeds life when order breeds habit.

Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.

The best way to break a bad habit is to drop it.

The law of harvest is to reap more than you sow. Sow an act, and you reap a habit. Sow a habit and you reap a character. Sow a character and you reap a destiny.

We who have been born and nurtured on this soil, we, whose habits, manners, and customs are the same in common with other Americans, can never consent to - be the bearers of the redress offered by that Society to that much afflicted.

Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.

Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.

All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsions, habit, reason, passion, desire.

Good habits formed at youth make all the difference.

Moral excellence comes about as a result of habit. We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.

The moral virtues, then, are produced in us neither by nature nor against nature. Nature, indeed, prepares in us the ground for their reception, but their complete formation is the product of habit.

Quality is not an act, it is a habit.

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.

I can scarcely manage to scribble a tolerable English letter. I know that I am not a scholar, but meantime I am aware that no man living knows better than I do the habits of our birds.

I never for a day gave up listening to the songs of our birds, or watching their peculiar habits, or delineating them in the best way I could.

There is surely no contradiction in saying that a certain section of the community may be quite competent to protect the persons and property of the rest, yet quite unfit to direct our opinions, or to superintend our private habits.

Choose the life that is most useful, and habit will make it the most agreeable.

Correcting bad habits cannot be done by forbidding or punishment.