The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.
Interpretation
Habits often go unnoticed until they have become too ingrained to change.
This quote by Samuel Johnson highlights the subtlety of habits in our lives. Initially, they may seem insignificant or easy to ignore, but over time, they can grow to a point where they dictate our behaviors and choices without us realizing it. Recognizing and breaking bad habits requires awareness and effort, as they can eventually become powerful forces that resist change.
In practice
In a motivational speech about personal development.
To be of no church is dangerous. Religion, of which the rewards are distant, and which is animated only by faith and hope, will glide by degrees out of the mind unless it be invigorated and reimpressed by external ordinances, by stated calls to worship, and the salutary influence of example.
He that reads and grows no wiser seldom suspects his own deficiency, but complains of hard words and obscure sentences, and asks why books are written which cannot be understood.
To let friendship die away by negligence and silence is certainly not wise. It is voluntarily to throw away one of the greatest comforts of the weary pilgrimage.
Fly-fishing may be a very pleasant amusement; but angling or float fishing I can only compare to a stick and a string, with a worm at one end and a fool at the other.
When any anxiety or gloom of the mind takes hold of you, make it a rule not to publish it by complaining; but exert yourselves to hide it, and by endeavoring to hide it you drive it away.
A fishing rod is a stick with a hook at one end and a fool at the other.
Each of us can work to change a small portion of events. And it's in the total of all those acts that the history of this generation will be written.
There is no such thing as a Fourth Industrial Revolution with 9 billion thriving co-citizens in the world if it is accomplished on linear economic principles. We need a transition to circular economic principles and practice.
More people are killed by stray bullets every day in America than have been killed by Ebola here. More are dying because of poverty and hunger.
The present Arab uprising didn't stem from Israel. The old guard is trying to keep down the young chickens. The old guard is better organized. They may win elections, but unless they have a solution to poverty, to corruption, to oppression, they will not last. I am with the young people.
The rose is a rose from the time it is a seed to the time it dies. Within it, at all times, it contains its whole potential. It seems to be constantly in the process of change: Yet at each state, at each moment, it is perfectly all right as it is.
I must be willing to give up what I am in order to become what I will be.
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