Word: habits
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Dates: during 1910-1919
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During the past ten years there has arisen among Harvard graduates a tendency which has by this time developed into a habit all the more marked because of its spontaneity and its national character. In almost all the large cities in nearly every part of America, Harvard graduates have gravitated towards each other with the purpose of organizing Harvard clubs. Though, of course, these organizations are, on the surface, social, yet the real cause of their foundation is to be found in a far deeper motive. In the last analysis, all of them have been imbued with a most generous...
...conversation both William James and his father had a delightful sense of humor, a similar richness of vocabulary, and an equal individuality in its use. A peculiarity of both was the habit of delaying speech for an instant, while the mind was working and the telling sentence was framing itself for utterance--a brief interval during which the lips would gather slightly, as for a sort of smile, and the eyes and faces take on an indescribable expression of great charm. Then would burst forth one of those longer or shorter epigrammatic or aphoristic sayings which their friends all recall...
...importance in handling teams. Besides, as it worked out, most of the money subscribed came from Freshmen who through ignorance or shyness felt in necessary to give liberally to each of the twelve or fifteen managerial candidates who were sure to call upon them. Generosity is an excellent habit, but being imposed upon...
...know of nothing so interesting as meeting the mind fresh as it comes into the College, and trying to impress it as well as you can with the habit of thought, trying to stimulate its imagination, trying to get it into the university way. And it is also illuminating, it shows you a good many things. One of the things that it has shown me is that few of the boys who come to us from schools can read books; they can read the printed page, of course, a sentence or a paragraph, but they cannot read a book...
Such a happy attitude would be far less prevalent if there existed more generally a truer and fuller conception of the real significance of a habit formed. "Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its ever so small scar. The drunken Rip Van Winkle, in Jefferson's play, excuses himself for each fresh dereliction by saying, "I wont 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. Down among his nerve-cells and fibres, the molecules are counting it, registering and storing...