“Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed down-stairs one step at a time.”

— Mark Twain

Variant: Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs one step at a time.

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Mark Twain 637

American author and humorist 1835–1910

Joe Girard (1928–2019) American salesman

“Her imagination was by habit ridiculously active; when the door was not open it jumped out the window.”

Henry James book The Portrait of a Lady

Source: The Portrait of a Lady

“So long as one is happy one can endure any discipline: it was unhappiness that broke down the habits of work.”

Graham Greene book The End of the Affair

Source: The End of the Affair

“Fight like a man. Habit is overcome by habit.”

Thomas à Kempis book The Imitation of Christ

Source: The Imitation of Christ

“People have a funny habit of taking as ‘natural’ whatever they are used to—but there hasn’t been any ‘natural’ environment, the way they mean it, since men climbed down out of trees.”

Robert A. Heinlein book Farmer in the Sky

Source: Farmer in the Sky (1950), Chapter 2, “The Green-Eyed Monster” (p. 21)

“Man's books are but a climbing stair,
Lain step by step, like stairs of stone;
The stairway here, the temple there —
Man's lampad honor, and his trust,
The God who called him from the dust.”

Joaquin Miller (1837–1913) American judge

"The Larger College".
In Classic Shades, and Other Poems (1890)

“Any act often repeated soon forms a habit : and habit allowed, steadily gains in strength.”

Tryon Edwards (1809–1894) American theologian

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.

“Habit is necessary; it is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive.”

Edith Wharton (1862–1937) American novelist, short story writer, designer

"A First Word"
A Backward Glance http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200271.txt (1934)

“The information I got from one person often contradicted the version I heard from another, so I’d long ago gotten into the habit of trying to hear as many different stories as I could and averaging them all out. The truth was in there somewhere, I knew it; the problem was coaxing it into the open.”

George Alec Effinger book When Gravity Fails

Source: When Gravity Fails (1986), Chapter 7 (p. 90).

“Growing old is no more than a bad habit which a busy man has no time to form.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Quoted in The Aging American
Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Growing Old

“Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed down-stairs one step at a time.”

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Mark Twain 637

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