Habituation Quotes

“When all you know is pain you don’t know that that is not normal. It is not a woman’s lot to suffer, even if we’ve been raised that way."

(Address, 2011 Endometriosis Foundation of America Blossom Ball)”
― Susan Sarandon

“Excellence is an art won by training and habituation: we do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have these because we have acted rightly; 'these virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions'; we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit: 'the good of man is a working of the soul in the way of excellence in a complete life... for as it is not one swallow or one fine day that makes a spring, so it is not one day or a short time that makes a man blessed and happy”
― Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers

“With so much unknown in this life, how little it takes for a face, a grove of trees, an outcropping of stone to become familiar.”
― Larry Watson, Let Him Go

“A thousand things that had seemed unnatural and repulsive speedily became natural and ordinary to me. I suppose everything in existence takes its colour from the average hue of our surroundings.”
― H.G. Wells, The Island of Dr. Moreau

“A man who wakes up to a pair of double D breasts of his wife every morning, is neurologically destined to get used to them, regardless of their size. This is called “Habituation”. But this process of habituation does not say anything about the love and care between two persons in a committed relationship. Love is not the primeval surge of libidinal lust that a person receives when meeting a suitable partner for the first time. Love in the truest sense of the term is born much later in a relationship, when both sides get to the know the truest selves of each other. And when love is born out of the pyre of commitment and attachment, it is no longer about having sex, it is about making love and becoming one with each other in every manner possible.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The Bengal Tigress: A Treatise on Gender Equality

“Among life's cruelest truths is this one: Wonderful things are especially wonderful the first time they happen, but their wonderfulness wanes with repetition. Just compare the first and last time your child said "Mama" or your partner said "I love you" and you'll know exactly what I mean. When we have an experience _ hearing a particular sonata, making love with a particular person, watching the sun set from a particular window of a particular room on successive occasions, we quickly begin to adapt to it, and the experience yields less pleasure each time. Psychologists call this habituation, economists call it declining marginal utility, and the rest of us call it marriage.”
― Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness

“The question to round off this exploration of townscape is this: does the magic of places gradually drain away through familiarity? How do we counter those who claim that the worm that corrupts our delight in cities is habituation ? Fine for visitors, but what about inhabitants who see their town or city day after day? // The answer lies in the nature of emotional reward. If habituation really was the killer, then we would not bother to hear repeats of Brahms or Britten; we would have no wish to return to Florence or Prague. The fact is, the more places engage with the emotions the more resilient they are to erosion by habituation.”
― Peter F. Smith, The Dynamics of Delight

“Filomena's heart starts to sink. Another feeling she's grown used to. -- Never After, The Thirteenth Fairy”
― Melissa de la Cruz, The Broken Mirror