“Small wins are a steady application of a small advantage.”

If you want to do something that requires willpower – like going for a run after work – you have to conserve your willpower muscle during the day.

Habits are malleable throughout your entire life.

The best agencies understood the importance of routines. The worst agencies were headed by people who never thought about it, and then wondered why no one followed their orders.

Companies aren’t families. They’re battlefields in a civil war.

Belief is easier when it occurs within a community.

If you believe you can change – if you make it a habit – the change becomes real.

The problem is that your brain can’t tell the difference between bad and good habits, and so if you have a bad one, it’s always lurking there, waiting for the right cues and rewards.

Since the 17th century, insurance agents have been the foremost experts on risk.

Once you understand that habits can change, you have the freedom and the responsibility to remake them. Once you understand that habits can be rebuilt, the power of habit becomes easier to grasp and the only option left is to get to work.

Habits, scientists say, emerge because the brain is constantly looking for ways to save effort.

It is facile to imply that smoking, alcoholism, overeating, or other ingrained patters can be upended without real effort. Genuine change requires work and self-understanding of the cravings driving behaviours.

The Golden Rule of Habit Change: You can’t extinguish a bad habit, you can only change it.

This is the real power of habit: the insight that your habits are what you choose them to be.

Champions don’t do extraordinary things. They do ordinary things, but they do them without thinking, too fast for the orther team to react. They follow the habits they’ve learned.

The same process that makes AA so effective-the power of a group to teach individuals how to believe-happens whenever people come together to help one another change. Belief is easier when it occurs within a community.

For a habit to stay changed, people must believe change is possible.

The real test of one’s belief in the doctrine of Habeas Corpus is not when one demands its application on behalf of one’s friends but of one’s enemies.

Talk of imminent threat to our national security through the application of external force is pure nonsense. Our threat is from the insidious forces working from within which have already so drastically altered the character of our free institutions – those institutions we proudly called the American way of life.

One tries to tell a truth, and one hopes that the truth has a general application rather than just a specific one.

Philosophy cannot be taught; it is the application of the sciences to truth.

There are very few things impossible in themselves; and we do not want means to conquer difficulties so much as application and resolution in the use of means.

Few things are impracticable in themselves; and it is for want of application, rather than of means, that men fail to succeed.

The Self has turned out to mean so many things, to mean them so ambiguously, and to be so wavering in its application, that we do not feel encouraged.

The use of a growing array of derivatives and the related application of more-sophisticated approaches to measuring and managing risk are key factors underpinning the greater resilience of our largest financial institutions…