Habit is a cable; we weave a thread of it each day, and at last we cannot break it.
Interpretation
Habits are formed over time and become difficult to change once established.
This quote by Horace Mann illustrates the concept that our daily actions and routines gradually become habits, much like weaving a cable. Over time, these practices intertwine and strengthen, making it increasingly challenging to break free from them, emphasizing the importance of nurturing positive habits.
In practice
This quote can be shared during a motivational workshop to highlight the importance of building good habits.
Under the Providence of God, our means of education are the grand machinery by which the 'raw material' of human nature can be worked up into inventors and discoverers, into skilled artisans and scientific farmers, into scholars and jurists, into the founders of benevolent institutions, and the great expounders of ethical and theological science.
Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.
There may be frugality which is not economy. A community, that withholds the means of education from its children, withholds the bread of life and starves their souls.
Let us labor for that larger comprehension of truth, and that more thorough repudiation of error, which shall make the history of mankind a series of ascending developments.
Great knowledge is requisite to instruct those who have been well instructed, but still greater knowledge is requisite to instruct those who have been neglected.
Virtue is an angel, but she is a blind one, and must ask Knowledge to show her the pathway that leads to her goal.
With how many things are we on the brink of becoming acquainted, if cowardice or carelessness did not restrain our inquiries.
Being busy is a form of laziness - lazy thinking and indiscriminate action. Being busy is most often used as a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions.
Not biology, but ignorance of ourselves, has been the key to our powerlessness
If God treats you well by teaching you a disastrous lesson, you never forget it.
Those caught in the cycle of self-concern suffer helplessly, while the compassionate are more free and, implicitly, more happy.
In building a path through the self to the far shore of awareness, we have to carefully pick our way through our own wilderness. If we can put our minds into a place of surrender, we will have an easier time feeling the contours of the land. We do not have to break our way through as much as we have to find our way around the major obstacles. We do not have to cure every neurosis, we just have to learn how not to be caught by them.
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