#Routine Quotes

“Why should we rise because 'tis light? Did we lie down because t'was night?”

“Keep the town for occasions, but the habits should be formed in retirement.”

“I've been an exercise maniac most of my adult life, running marathons and triathlons, doing that as a regular way of life. I ran eight miles a day, every day for 29 years.”

“To do things today exactly the way you did them yesterday saves thinking.”

“We fetch fire and water, run about all day among the shops and markets, and get our clothes and shoes made and mended, and are thevictims of these details, and once in a fortnight we arrive perhaps at a rational moment.”

“So much of our time is spent in preparation, so much in routine, and so much in retrospect, that the amount of each person's genius is confined to a very few hours.”

“The entire routine of our memorized acquisitions, for example, is a consequence of nothing but the Law of Contiguity. The words of a poem, the formulas of trigonometry, the facts of history, the properties of material things, are all known to us as definite systems or groups of objects which cohere in an order fixed by innumerable iterations, and of which any one part reminds us of the others.”

“You must sleep sometime between lunch and dinner, and no halfway measures. Take off your clothes and get into bed. That's what I always do.”

“All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits.”

“All the daily routine of life, our dressing and undressing, the coming and going from our work or carrying through of its various operations, is utterly without mental reference to pleasure and pain, except under rarely realized conditions.”

“In youth we may have an absolutely new experience, subjective or objective, every hour of the day. Apprehension is vivid, retentiveness strong, and our recollections of that time, like those in a time spent in rapid and interesting travel, are of something intricate, multitudinous, and long-drawn-out. But as each passing year converts some of this experience into automatic routine which we hardly note at all, the days and the weeks smooth themselves out in recollection to a contentless unit, and the years grow hollow and collapse.”

“Whether I retire to bed early or late, I rise with the sun.”

“All things here appear to me to trudge on in one and the same round: we rise in the morning that we may eat breakfast, dinner andsupper and to bed again that we may get up the next morning and do the same: so that you never saw two peas more alike than our yesterday and to-day.”

“I prime my mind. I wake up every morning and say, "Look, if you don't have 10 minutes for yourself, you don't have a life." I take 10 minutes.”

“Effort ceases. Time flaps on the mast. There we stop; there we stand. Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame”

“The most active lives have so much routine as to preclude progress almost equally with the most inactive.”

“To rise at six, to dine at ten,To sup at six, to sleep at ten,Makes a man live for ten times ten.”

“They get up early, because they have so much to do, and go to bed early, because they have so little to think about.”

“It seems like we wake up and it's a race until you get to bed. It gets to you after a while and you think, 'What the hell am I doing?'”

“Finish each day before you begin the next, and interpose a solid wall of sleep between the two. This you cannot do without temperance.”

“Repetition is the reality and the seriousness of life.”

“I should have remembered that when one is going to lead an entirely new life, one requires regular and wholesome meals.”

“Monotony is the law of nature. Look at the monotonous manner in which the sun rises. The monotony of necessary occupation is exhilarating and life giving.”

“The first thing I do in the morning is to make my bed and while I am making up my bed I am making up my mind as to what kind of a day I am going to have.”

“Men love to be the first to read the newspaper in the morning. Not being the first is upsetting to their psyches.”

“I often take exercise. Why only yesterday I had breakfast in bed.”

“I lived in an attached house. My father used to drive into the wrong driveway all the time. He'd say, Damn it, how do you tell one of these houses from another?”

“I get up in the morning, and I'm reluctant to turn on the television.”

“I never have written every day. When I'm writing a book, I write Monday through Friday. I always try to take Saturday and pretend to have some sanity.”

“Routine is a ground to stand on, a wall to retreat to; we cannot draw on our boots without bracing ourselves against it.”

“I make writing as much a part of my life as I do eating or listening to music.”

“Because of our routines we forget that life is an ongoing adventure.”

“An early-morning walk is a blessing for the whole day.”

“There is an incessant influx of novelty into the world, and yet we tolerate incredible dullness. When sometimes I am reminded that the mechanics and shopkeepers stay in their shops not only all the forenoon, but all the afternoon too, sitting with crossed legs, so many of them - as if the legs were made to sit upon, and not to stand or walk upon.”

“I've never really resented hard work because I've always liked it. Up every morning for roadwork. Going to the gymnasium every day at 12 o'clock. I never change my pattern.”

“I might have it at six-fifteen a.m. just as soon as I get in, but usually it's about eleven o'clock when I'll have a glass of sherry.”

“If you're watching a parade, don't follow it. It never changes. If the parade is boring, run in the opposite direction. You will fast-forward the parade.”

“We had to be to the stadium at six o'clock for home games, and traffic was so bad it would take us an hour and fifteen or an hour and thirty minutes to drive. So now I'm sitting in a car for almost an hour and a half and I'm very tense. I'm worried about the traffic. So I started smoking a cigar going to the games.”

“It is but too easy to establish another durable and harmonious routine. Immediately all parts of nature consent to it. Only make something to take the place of something, and men will behave as if it was the very thing they wanted.”

“Every week we ought to have one hour for recieving letters, then go take a bath.”

“So much of what we do every single day is the result of habits that we have formed over time.”

“It is related of an Englishman that he hanged himself to avoid the daily task of dressing and undressing.”

“It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves.”

“When you finish reading the book [Today Matters], take the daily dozen and list them in order of how well you do them. For example, the one that I would put at the highest for me is attitude or relationships because I'm really strong at both of those. At the bottom would be health. What I tell people is, "Take one month and work on one of the daily dozen for a whole year." And so it's really a one-year personal growth plan.”

“I work out every morning. Only half an hour. I get on the treadmill. That's it. Every morning, I don't care what time. It gets your blood flowing. It gets your adrenaline flowing. I believe in eating well. It's not fanatical. Eat good food. Make sure you've got good vegetables.”

“If I've had a particularly crazy day, I try to squeeze in a nice hot bath before I go to bed. And I have a hot cup of tea, usually some kind of chamomile.”

“You will never change your life until you change something you do daily. The secret of your success is found in your daily routine.”

“Getting out of one car and getting into another”

“Still we live meanly, like ants; though the fable tells us that we were long ago changed into men; like pygmies we fight with cranes; it is error upon error, and clout upon clout, and our best virtue has for its occasion a superfluous and evitable wretchedness. Our life is frittered away by detail.”

“Men emerge pale from the little printing plant at four sharp, ghosts for an instant, blinking, until the outdoor light overcomes the look of constant indoor light clinging to them.”