It is not by spectacular achievements that man can be transformed, but by will. Frey himself had made the great discovery that it is the moments which seem normal, almost tedious, that shape the soul — not the crises.

We are always getting ready to live, but never living. And the man who postpones the hour of living rightly, like the rustic who waits for the river to flow away before he crosses, waits for a river that flows on forever.

The chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken. But in business, the most dangerous habits are the ones that once made you successful — they calcify into dogma precisely because they worked.

The chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken. In investing, the habits that cost you the most are the ones that feel like prudence: checking prices daily, reading every headline, confusing activity with insight.

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. Yet the most dangerous habit is the habit of certainty — for it closes the very faculties by which excellence is sustained.

We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are. And what we are is largely what we have consented to become, through the daily, unremarked choices that accumulate into a character — and finally a fate.

The child who desires education will be educated by his family, by his church, by every circumstance he meets and by his own will; the child who does not want education will not be educated even if he attends school forty years.

It is not reason that gives us our moral principles, but habit and feeling. And yet the man who cannot give a reason for his virtue is in the gravest danger of losing it when circumstances change.

The moment we cease to take stock of what is habitual, we begin to understand what is possible. Most men mistake the ruts of their days for the roads of their destiny.

We are always getting ready to live, but never living. And the readiness is all we ever achieve — a perpetual anteroom to the life we meant to begin tomorrow.

The chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken — but there is a second half to that observation that people miss: the same compounding force that imprisons you can liberate you, if you choose the habit deliberately.

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. Yet habit without reflection is merely the armor of the sleepwalker.

The most important question to ask on the job is not 'What am I getting?' but 'What am I becoming?' Wages and salaries are poor measures of the value of your time. The real return on your work is the set of skills, habits, and judgment you accumulate — because those compound, and your paycheck doesn't.

The trained man is not the man who can perform a difficult feat, but the man who has so internalized a practice that he no longer notices he is performing it. Mastery is invisibility to itself.

The chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken. But the truly dangerous habit in business is the one that feels like virtue — the discipline of doing what worked yesterday, precisely when the world has already moved on.

We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its little scar. The drunken Rip Van Winkle, in Jefferson's play, excuses himself for every fresh dereliction by saying, 'I won't count this time!' Well, he may not count it, and a kind Heaven may not count it; but it is being counted none the less.

It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.

The chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken. Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when you woke up. Discharge your duties faithfully and well. Step by step you get ahead, but not necessarily in fast spurts.

The stock market is a device for transferring money from the impatient to the patient. But what most people miss is that patience itself is a skill — and like all skills, it atrophies without deliberate practice against the grain of every instinct you have.

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit — yet habit itself is the enemy of wonder, and wonder is the beginning of philosophy.

The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook. The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will.

It is not the magnitude of our actions but the place they hold in our lives that gives them their character. Thus the smallest good act today is the conquest of the whole future.

We shall not cease from mental fight, nor shall our sword sleep in our hand — but the enemy we must overcome is not without, it is the lethargy within us that mistakes comfort for peace and habit for wisdom.

We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never-so-little scar. The drunken Rip Van Winkle, in Jefferson's play, excuses himself for every fresh dereliction by saying, 'I won't count this time.' Well, he may not count it, and a kind Heaven may not count it; but it is being counted none the less.

The chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken. But there is a second, less-discussed corollary: institutions that survive longest are those that deliberately audit their habits before those habits calcify into dogma. Most companies wait until the weight becomes a crisis.

We are all of us the worse for too much liberty, and the better for a master hand — not from without, but from the discipline we impose upon ourselves when we understand what the work demands.

The chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken. Most investors underestimate how much their early portfolio habits — the things they barely notice doing — compound into the architecture of their entire financial life.

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. But habit itself is not merely repetition — it is the slow carving of character, the way water shapes stone not by force but by persistence.

The man who is perpetually hesitating which of two things he will do first, will do neither. The man who resolves, but does not execute his resolution, has not yet learned to think.

The chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken. A young person who consistently saves a small amount will find, decades later, that the habit has built a fortress; a young person who defers saving will find the habit of spending has built a prison.

We are more than half of what we are by imitation. The great point is to choose good models and to study them with care.

It is not by spectacular achievements that man can be transformed, but by will. A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.

The funnel of opportunity is wider than most people think, but the filter of execution is far narrower than most people realize. Ideas are not the scarce resource; disciplined follow-through on a single idea, long past the point of comfort, is what almost no one can sustain.

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. And it is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits.

It is not reason that gives us our moral principles; it is habit, custom, the slow deposit of human experience. Reason comes after, to justify or to criticize what instinct and tradition have already established.

We are all of us the worse for too much solitude. A man who shuts himself up from his kind becomes at last unfit for society; he acquires a hundred habits and opinions incompatible with life among men, and the cure for this evil is not to be found in the society of fools, but in that of the wise.

Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily.

The chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken. Most people don't recognize the institutional imperative at work — the tendency of organizations to mindlessly imitate whatever peers are doing, regardless of whether it makes sense.

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.