56 Best Quotes About Habits To Inspire You in 2024

🏆 Quotes about habits and success

As you probably know, successful people often attribute their achievements to their daily habits. These quotes highlight how the right habits can help you win and achieve your dreams with the power of consistency.

1. “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” — Will Durant
2. “Your habits will determine your future.” — Jack Canfield
3. “Your beliefs become your thoughts, your thoughts become your words, your words become your actions, your actions become your habits, your habits become your values, your values become your destiny.” — Gandhi
4. “Winning is not a sometime thing; it’s an all-time thing. You don’t win once in a while, you don’t do things right once in a while, you do them right all the time. Winning is a habit. Unfortunately, so is losing.” — Vince Lombardi
5. “You cannot change your future, but you can change your habits, and surely your habits will change your future.” — Abdul Kalam
6. “Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going.” — Jim Ryun
7. “Success is the sum of small efforts repeated day in and day out.” — Robert Collier
8. “Our character is basically a composite of our habits. Because they are consistent, often unconscious patterns, they constantly, daily, express our character.” — Stephen Covey, author of ‘The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People’ 👉 Read our summary!
9. “We first make our habits, then our habits make us.” — John Dryden
10. “Successful people are simply those with successful habits.” — Brian Tracy, author of ‘Eat That Frog’ 👉 Read our summary!
11. “The biggest difference between successful people and unsuccessful people is that successful people are willing to do what unsuccessful people are not.” — Darren Hardy, author of ‘The Compound Effect’

🔄 Quotes about daily habits and routines

Our lives are shaped by what we do every day. That means small steps can lead to big changes, when we use the magic of routine to help us become more productive and healthy.

1. “The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.” — Samuel Johnson
2. “First, forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you’re inspired or not. […] Habit is persistence in practice.” — Octavia Butler
3. “What you do every day matters more than what you do once in a while.” — Gretchen Rubin, author of ‘Better Than Before’
4. “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim.” — Annie Dillard
5. “You’ll never change your life until you change something you do daily. The secret of your success is found in your daily routine.” — John C. Maxwell
6. “The difference between an amateur and a professional is in their habits. An amateur has amateur habits. A professional has professional habits. We can never free ourselves from habit. But we can replace bad habits with good ones.” — Steven Pressfield, author of ‘The War of Art’ 👉 Read our summary!
7. “To learn hard things quickly, you must focus intensely without distraction.” — Cal Newport, author of ‘Deep Work’ 👉 Read our summary!
8. “Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.” — Chuck Close
9. “All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits.” — William James
10. “Sow a thought, and you reap an act; Sow an act, and you reap a habit; Sow a habit, and you reap a character; Sow a character, and you reap a destiny.” ― Samuel Smiles

⚛️ Quotes from Atomic Habits by James Clear

These quotes are from the mega-bestselling book “Atomic Habits” by James Clear 👉 Read our detailed summary! His approach emphasizes the compound effect of tiny habits, building systems over setting goals, and creating identity-based habits.

1. “Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your new identity.” — James Clear, author of ‘Atomic Habits’
2. “Too often, we convince ourselves that massive results require massive action. Success is the product of daily habits—not once-in-a-lifetime transformations.” — James Clear, author of ‘Atomic Habits’
3. “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” — James Clear, author of ‘Atomic Habits’
4. “Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement. […] If you can get 1% better each day for one year, you’ll end up 37 times better by the time you’re done.” — James Clear, author of ‘Atomic Habits’
5. “Changes that seem small and unimportant at first will compound into remarkable results if you’re willing to stick with them for years.” — James Clear, author of ‘Atomic Habits’
6. “Goals are about the results you want to achieve. Systems are about the processes that lead to those results. […] Goals are good for setting a direction, but systems are best for making progress.” — James Clear, author of ‘Atomic Habits’
7. “Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement. The same way that money multiplies through compound interest, the effects of your habits multiply as you repeat them. They seem to make little difference on any given day and yet the impact they deliver over the months and years can be enormous. It is only when looking back two, five, or perhaps ten years later that the value of good habits and the cost of bad ones becomes strikingly apparent.” — James Clear, author of ‘Atomic Habits’
8. “It doesn’t matter how successful or unsuccessful you are right now. What matters is whether your habits are putting you on the path toward success. You should be far more concerned with your current trajectory than with your current results.” — James Clear, author of ‘Atomic Habits’
9. “Every habit is initiated by a cue. […] One of the most practical ways to eliminate a bad habit is to reduce exposure to the cue that causes it.” — James Clear, author of ‘Atomic Habits’

🌱 Quotes about building good habits

Starting good habits is like planting seeds for a better future. From drinking more water to reading daily, discover how simple habits can dramatically improve your well-being and productivity.

1. “All change is hard at first, messy in the middle and gorgeous at the end.” — Robin Sharma, author of ‘The 5AM Club’ 👉 Read our summary!
2. “Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good.” — Malcolm Gladwell
3. “Learning to do the things you need to do, regardless of how you feel, is a core discipline for success.” —Brian P. Moran, author of ‘The 12 Week Year’
4. “Change might not be fast and it isn’t always easy. But with time and effort, almost any habit can be reshaped.” — Charles Duhigg, author of ‘The Power of Habit’
5. “With the Tiny Habits method, you focus on small actions that you can do in less than thirty seconds.” — BJ Fogg, author of ‘Tiny Habits’
6. “The essence of Tiny Habits is this: Take a behavior you want, make it tiny, find where it fits naturally in your life, and nurture its growth.” — BJ Fogg, author of ‘Tiny Habits’
7. “You need to be doing fewer things for more effect instead of doing more things with side effects.” — Gary Keller, author of ‘The ONE Thing’
8. “Strive for progress, not perfection.” – Unknown
9. “We must all suffer from one of two pains: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret.” — Jim Rohn
10. “Take excellent care of the front end of your day, and the rest of your day will pretty much take care of itself. Own your morning. Elevate your life.” — Robin Sharma, author of ‘The 5AM Club’

🚫 Quotes about breaking bad habits

Getting rid of bad habits opens the door to improvement. Learn how replacing negative patterns with positive ones can lead to a better you.

1. “The truth is, you don’t break a bad habit; you replace it with a good one.” — Denis Waitley
2. “The Golden Rule of habit change […] to change a habit, you must keep the old cue, and deliver the old reward, but insert a new routine.” — Charles Duhigg, author of ‘The Power of Habit’ 👉 Read our summary!
3. “A nail is driven out by another nail; habit is overcome by habit.” — Erasmus
4. “It is easier to prevent bad habits than to break them.” — Benjamin Franklin 👉 Read our summary of his Autobiography!
5. “The Habit Loop. How habits work. […] This process within our brains is a three-step loop. First, there is a cue, a trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use. Then there is the routine, which can be physical or mental or emotional. Finally, there is a reward, which helps your brain figure out if this particular loop is worth remembering for the future.” — Charles Duhigg, author of ‘The Power of Habit’
6. “Discipline is choosing between what you want now and what you want most.” – Abraham Lincoln
7. “No man is free who is not master of himself.” — Epictetus
8. “The paradox is that hedonism, the pursuit of pleasure for its own sake, leads to anhedonia, which is the inability to enjoy pleasure of any kind. […] The reason we’re all so miserable may be because we’re working so hard to avoid being miserable.” — Dr. Anna Lembke, author of ‘Dopamine Nation’ 👉 Read our summary!
9. “The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything.” — Warren Buffett

🥗 Quotes about healthy habits

Living healthy is all about good habits – whether you’re a fan of regular exercise, balanced eating, or mindfulness.

1. “Habits eliminate the need for self-control.” — Gretchen Rubin, author of ‘Better than Before’
2. “I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks, but I do fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.” — Bruce Lee
3. “Healthy habits are learned in the same way as unhealthy ones — through practice.” — Wayne Dyer
4. “According to scientists who have studied the five Blue Zones, the keys to longevity are diet, exercise, finding a purpose in life (an ikigai ), and forming strong social ties—that is, having a broad circle of friends and good family relations.” — From ‘Ikigai’ by H. Garcia and F. Miralles
5. “The happiest people are not the ones who achieve the most. They are the ones who spend more time than others in a state of flow. […] Concentrating on one thing at a time may be the single most important factor in achieving flow.” — From ‘Ikigai’ by H. Garcia and F. Miralles
6. “No man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.” — Socrates