“… habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous.”
Source: The Summing Up (1938), p. 182
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W. Somerset Maugham 158
British playwright, novelist, short story writer 1874–1965Related quotes
“Life is loneliness, broken only by the gods taunting us with friendship and the odd bonk”
“To fall into a habit is to begin to cease to be.”
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), IX : Faith, Hope, and Charity
“Any act often repeated soon forms a habit : and habit allowed, steadily gains in strength.”
At first it may be but as the spider’s web, easily broken through, but if not resisted it soon binds us with chains of steel.
Source: A Dictionary of Thoughts, 1891, p. 212.
“The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.”
“Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.”
Though Buffet is reported to have expressed such ideas with such remarks many times in his lectures, he never claimed to originate the idea, and in the article "The Chains of Habit Are Too Light To Be Felt Until They Are Too Heavy To Be Broken" at the Quote Investigator http://quoteinvestigator.com/tag/warren-buffett/ it is shown that this sort of expression about chains goes back at least to similar ideas presented by Samuel Johnson in "The Vision of Theodore, The Hermit of Teneriffe, Found in His Cell" in The Gentleman’s Magazine, Vol. 18 (April 1748), p.160:
It was the peculiar artifice of Habit not to suffer her power to be felt at first. Those whom she led, she had the address of appearing only to attend, but was continually doubling her chains upon her companions; which were so slender in themselves, and so silently fastened, that while the attention was engaged by other objects, they were not easily perceived. Each link grew tighter as it had been longer worn, and when, by continual additions, they became so heavy as to be felt, they were very frequently too strong to be broken.
Such sentiments were later succinctly summarized by Maria Edgeworth in Moral Tales For Young People by Miss Edgeworth (1806), Vol 1, Second Edition, p. 86:
… the diminutive chains of habit, as somebody says, are scarcely ever heavy enough to be felt, till they are too strong to be broken.
Disputed
“The chains of habit are generally too small to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.”
“Life — how curious is that habit that makes us think it is not here, but elsewhere.”
Vol. 2, Ch. 6
Midnight Oil (1971)