The chain of habit coils itself around the heart like a serpent, to gnaw and stifle it.—HAZLITT.
You can not, in any given case, by any sudden and single effort, will to be true, if the habit of your life has been insincerity.—F. W. ROBERTSON.
It is a beautiful provision in the mental and moral arrangement of our nature, that that which is performed as a duty may by frequent repetition, become a habit; and the habit of stern virtue, so repulsive to others, may hang around our neck like a wreath of flowers.—PAXTON HOOD.
"When shall I begin to train my child?" asked a young mother of a learned physician.
"How old is the child?" inquired the doctor.
"Two years, sir."
"Then you have lost just two years," replied he, gravely.
"You must begin with his grandmother," said Oliver Wendell Holmes, when asked a similar question.
"At the mouth of the Mississippi," says Beecher, "how impossible would it be to stay its waters, and to separate from each other the drops from the various streams that have poured in on either side,—of the Red River, the Arkansas, the Ohio, and the Missouri,—or to sift, grain by grain the particles of sand that have been washed from the Alleghany, or the Rocky Mountains; yet how much more impossible would it be when character is the river, and habits are the side-streams!"
"We sow an act, we reap a habit; we sow a habit, we reap a character."