Routine Quotes

His eagerness had turned into a routine; he embraced her at the same time every day. It was a habit like any other, a favourite pudding after the monotony of dinner.

Gustave Flaubert

I always like routine. I suppose I never found boredom very boring.

John Green

Life was not to be sitting in hot amorphic leisure in my backyard idly writing or not-writing, as the spirit moved me. It was, instead, running madly, in a crowded schedule, in a squirrel cage of busy people. Working, living, dancing, dreaming, talking, kissing — singing, laughing, learning. The responsibility, the awful responsibility of managing (profitably) 12 hours a day for 10 weeks is rather overwhelming when there is nothing, noone, to insert an exact routine into the large unfenced acres of time — which it is so easy to let drift by in soporific idling and luxurious relaxing. It is like lifting a bell jar off a securely clockwork-like functioning community, and seeing all the little busy people stop, gasp, blow up and float in the inrush, (or rather outrush,) of the rarified scheduled atmosphere — poor little frightened people, flailing impotent arms in the aimless air. That's what it feels like: getting shed of a routine. Even though one had rebelled terribly against it, even then, one feels uncomfortable when jounced out of the repetitive rut. And so with me. What to do? Where to turn? What ties, what roots? as I hang suspended in the strange thin air of back-home?

Sylvia Plath

Children with autism are constantly testing and pursuing truth. They are a bundle of contradictions. They love order and routine, yet often have the most amazingly inventive and creative minds. They may appear to follow rules, but are also the most likely people to come up with a revolutionary new idea. They feel emotion intensly, but often seem to struggle to read facial expressions.

Adele Devine

I want to caution you against the idea that balance has to be a routine that looks the same week in and week out.

Kevin Thoman

Routine is the one thing the can get you killed. It tells the enemy where you're going and when you're going to be there.

Anthony Horowitz

I guess I forgot we were going out tonight.""We always go out on Fridays.""It's Thursday, Alvis.""You are so tied to routine.

Jess Walter

What you practice too often, you use without thinking.

Robert Jordan

I slide to my knees and say, "Please let this be over." Then, I'm not ready for it to be over.

Andre Agassi

For discipline is imposed not just on oneself but on those in one's orbit.

Philip Roth

Conroy writes that, while part of him was following the basketball game from the bench, "the other part, an embassy of a completely sovereign nation, would fling its doors open to the most authentic part of me.

Pat Conroy

Sometimes chaos is the very thing that deliberately shakes up our neatly ordered world’s in order to get us out of the neatly ordered ruts that have kept us stuck.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

We all have our routines," he said softly."But they must have a purpose and provide an outcome that we can see and take some comfort from, or else they have no use at all. Without that, they are like the endless pacings of a caged animal. If they are not madness itself, then they are a prelude to it.

John Connolly

APPROACHRain is falling. Winter approaches. I drive towards it. In the slow rain. In the semi-darkness. Cello music is playing in the car. The deep sad sound of the cello. It almost swamps me. Routine endeavours to swamp me. The everyday paying of bills.But I paint men walking in a city of icebergs and crystal. Some of the icebergs are red. I paint a woman swimming in green wavy water. Surrounded by desert mesas. Bright orange in the sunlight. With darker orange for shadows. I paint two people. With purple and pink and yellow and blue circles overlapping the boundaries of their bodies. Dancing.Life is not ordinary. When I see you tonight I will press my lips to your eyelids. Each one in turn. I will rub my fingertips over the skin on the back of your hands and around your wrists. I will sigh. I will growl. I will whinny. I will gallop into your smile. One sharp foot after the other.

Jay Woodman

It has been written that so much of life is preparation, so much is routine, and so much is retrospect that the purest essence of anyone's genius contracts itself to a precious few hours.

James D. Hornfischer

But such occasions of excellence became less and less frequent. As her technique became sounder, [her] sincerity became less necessary.

Thornton Wilder

Even Damocles developed a routine.

Johnny Rich

Try your hardest to combat atrophy and routine. To question The Obvious and the given is an essential element of the maxim 'de omnius dubitandum' [All is to be doubted].

Christopher Hitchens

When you are stuck in the same routine for months, you stop seeing new opportunities.

Dhaval Gajera

Rest and comfort are two different things. Rest is a planned temporary time to refresh and refocus the leader. Comfort is when you settle into unproductive routines and accept satisfactory or unsatisfactory results.

Gary Rohrmayer

Spontaneities offer one kind of pleasure and taste of sanctity, repetitions another equally pleasurable and holy.

Eugene H. Peterson

Zeal is more often checked after long years in the same service than when novelty gives a charm to our work.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Her routine was as predictable as the rotation of the earth.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

When you're a kid, if you watch 'The Jeffersons' with your family at seven o'clock, it seems like a natural phenomenon, like the sun setting. The universe is a strange, strange place when all of a sudden you can't use your glass with the Bionic Woman on it any more.

Heather O'Neill

The day that lay before (was) full of infinite possibilities, though in a million superficial ways it was identical to the day before.

Ransom Riggs

Jack missed the normality of merely reading the paper.

Tom Clancy

The Marquesa would even have been astonished to learn that her letters were very good, for such authors live always in the noble weather of their own minds and those productions which seem remarkable to us are little better than a day's routine to them.

Thornton Wilder

Motivation may be what starts you off, but it's habit that keeps you going back for more.

Miya Yamanouchi

But the artist began to have misgivings as the wall underwent its transformation. Bigger than any pavement project he had yet undertaken, it made him restless. Over the years, a precise cycle had entered the rhythm of his life, the cycle of arrival, creation, and obliteration. Like sleeping, waking and stretching, or eating, digesting and excreting, the cycle sang in harmony with the blood in his veins and the breath in his lungs. He learned to disdain the overlong sojourn and the procrastinated departure, for they were the progenitors of complacent routine, to be shunned at all costs. The journey -- chanced, unplanned, solitary -- was the thing to relish.Now, however, his old way of life was being threatened. The agreeable neighborhood and the solidity of the long, black wall were reawakening in him the usual sources of human sorrow: a yearning for permanence, for roots, for something he could call his own....

Rohinton Mistry

If a country is not governed well, all sort of disasters will become a routine of that country!

Mehmet Murat ildan

When I was instructed to use medical oxygen to do my job at the W. M. Keck Observatory from 2001 to 2006, I was never told about the legal health information that is now posted on oxygen cylinders. My memories of the green medical oxygen cylinders that we would use daily is that they had no information on them and we were never given a recognised legal oxygen administration training course for routine daily use or a medical prescription from a doctor. We were shown the three oxygen cylinders at the facility and told to use them whenever we developed headaches, which was multiple times daily. It was common to find all three oxygen cylinders in use by other very high altitude workers and to have to line up to get a turn on the magical medical gas.

Steven Magee

Like a snake sheds its skin, we are capable of getting rid of assembled habits, creating space to call matters into question. Instead of the Shakespearian " To be or not to be " we could favor " to become or not to become". By "becoming", we challenge the range of possibilities in our life and go beyond the merely "being". We can retreat, then, from the imprisonment of a deadly routine, acquire an identity and develop our personality. ( "Man without Qualities" )

Erik Pevernagie

Stop walking through the motions of a conditioned routine and start consciously taking action on your visualized intent.

Steve Maraboli

If you follow the classical pattern, you are understanding the routine, the tradition, the shadow -- you are not understanding yourself.

Bruce Lee

And to those who believe that adventures are i say try routine: it kills you far more quickly.

Paulo Coelho

Of all modern notions, the worst is this: that domesticity is dull. Inside the home, they say, is dead decorum and routine; outside is adventure and variety. But the truth is that the home is the only place of liberty, the only spot on earth where a man can alter arrangements suddenly, make an experiment or indulge in a whim. The home is not the one tame place in a world of adventure; it is the one wild place in a world of rules and set tasks.

G.K. Chesterton

Women don't realize how much store men set on the regularity of their habits. We absorb their comings and goings into our bodies, their rhythms into our bones.

Louise Erdrich

Happy people do not wake up for breakfast.

Tetiana Liubetska

I was so much in the habit of having Albertine with me, and now I suddenly saw a new aspect of Habit. Hitherto I had regarded it chiefly as an annihilating force which suppresses the originality and even the awareness of one's perceptions; now I saw it as a dread deity, so riveted to one's being, its insignificant face so incrusted in one's heart, that if it detaches itself, if it turns away from one, this deity that one had barely distinguished inflicts on one sufferings more terrible than any other and is then as cruel as death itself.

Marcel Proust

If there’s a single idea I emphasize when people ask about writing, it’s that there’s no right way to produce a book. But I do think that whatever you do, you should do regularly, whether it’s waking up at midnight and drinking vodka or waking up at dawn and drinking tea, whether it’s sitting in a monkish study or writing on the back of a flatbed truck. The analogy I like is children’s literature: in a lot of children’s books, there’s a huge institutional structure (Hogwarts, for example) whose presiding safety allows the children’s imagination to run free. The more consistent your habits are – and this ties into having your tools nailed down – the more secure your brain will be to run free and create.

Charles Finch

The human spirit lives on creativity and dies in conformity and routine.

Vilayat Inayat Khan

I am wary of the whole dreary deadening structured mess that we have built into such a glittering top-heavy structure that there is nothing left to see but the glitter, and the brute routines of maintaining it.

John D. MacDonald

As long as there is thirst in you, water can quench it; but you can live a kind of life in which you never feel thirsty; do not go in the sun, do no manual work, stay at home and relax and you will not feel the thirst. But then you will find no joy in drinking water. He who toils all day, enjoys the bliss of a good night’s rest. This is ironical: if you want to enjoy the pleasure of a good night’s sleep you have to work like a labourer all day. The trouble is that you want to spend your days like an emperor and your nights like a labourer.

Osho

The more you get set into your own world, the smaller your world becomes.

J.R. Rim

Love has the power to create an inviting space in the lives of people. But if daily routine kills dreamy or passionate thoughts, the constraint of the room may become oppressive and the emptiness unbearable. The room loses then its original fullness and turns into a place of nothingness. ( " Another empty room" )

Erik Pevernagie

I was also sick of my neighbors, as most Parisians are. I now knew every second of the morning routine of the family upstairs. At 7:00 am alarm goes off, boom, Madame gets out of bed, puts on her deep-sea divers’ boots, and stomps across my ceiling to megaphone the kids awake. The kids drop bags of cannonballs onto the floor, then, apparently dragging several sledgehammers each, stampede into the kitchen. They grab their chunks of baguette and go and sit in front of the TV, which is always showing a cartoon about people who do nothing but scream at each other and explode. Every minute, one of the kids cartwheels (while bouncing cannonballs) back into the kitchen for seconds, then returns (bringing with it a family of excitable kangaroos) to the TV. Meanwhile the toilet is flushed, on average, fifty times per drop of urine expelled. Finally, there is a ten-minute period of intensive yelling, and at 8:15 on the dot they all howl and crash their way out of the apartment to school.” (p.137)

Stephen Clarke

At the W.M. Keck Observatory on the very high altitude summit of Mauna Kea, there was no routine monitoring of mental functioning, blood oxygen levels, blood pressure or heart rate of workers.

Steven Magee

As I discover, everyday is an adventure...so do what ever the Spirit tells you..don't do things out of drudgery or obligation...each day will unfold as it should...stay restful and try not to be in a hurry...there are things that can wait, and things we don't really need at all...don't be a slave to the everyday routine...we've all been programmed to do things, "just so"..try to shed the programming...you will be surprised how some things that hassle our minds aren't really important at all. And most of all, go out and heal with nature

Angie karan

If spectacle is lacking in everyday life, it may be because we have forgotten where and how to look.

Nel Noddings

During my time in high altitude astronomy, I routinely witnessed workers breathing medical oxygen, industrial carbon dioxide, nitrogen and helium gas as part of their daily work routine.

Steven Magee

Disillusioned, people simply carried out their work as intended, drinking away sobriety at the end of each hard shift and repeating the process until death.

Christopher Byford

Marriage must fight constantly against a monster which devours everything: routine.

Honoré de Balzac

When justice is more certain and more mild, is at the same time more efficacious.

Alexis de Tocqueville

Another day.How long are you gonna scroll down?SemicolonSmile

Sanhita Baruah

Why did every human concern clog itself up in a tangle of routines, formalities, disciplines, imperatives? Why couldn’t one be free? Really free? Guarding one’s freedom, wasn’t freedom at all. Why couldn’t one win one’s freedom for good and all, and get on with life?

H.G.Wells

The spectacle takes us away from our routines. For at least a time, we feel part of something big, colorful, exciting. It is perhaps understandable that civilians are often more enthusiastic during wartime than soldiers who have experienced battle. The soldiers know that war is often boring and dirty as well as terrifying and colorful. Even so, after some years, an old soldier like Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., could brush aside his earlier description of the pain, boredom, and death of war and declare that “its message was divine.” The stench disappears, but the spectacle remains in memory’s eye.

Nel Noddings

With his release imminent, Knight seems more unsettled than ever. He scratches furiously at his knees. Jail, he's realized, might not be all bad. There's routine and order in jail, and he's able to click into a survival mode that is not too dissimilar, in terms of steeliness of mental state, to the one he'd perfected during winters in the woods. "I'm surrounded in here by less than desirable people," he says, "but at least I wasn't thrown into the waters of society and expected to swim.

Michael Finkel

the patriotic or religious bumper stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers, who are usually talking on cell phones as they cut people off in order to get just twenty stupid feet ahead in the traffic jam...

David Foster Wallace

Motivation 1.0 presumed that humans were biological creatures, struggling to obtain our basic needs for food, security and sex.Motivation 2.0 presumed that humans also responded to rewards and punishments. That worked fine for routine tasks but incompatible with how we organize what we do, how we think about what we do, and howwe do what we do. We need an upgrade. Motivation 3.0, the upgrade we now need, presumes that humans also have a drive to learn, to create, and to better the world.

Daniel H. Pink

Comfort is a stance of avoidance rather than the pursuit of excellence.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

1 2 Next

Routine Quotes

Related Topics