ADDICTION

Watch your thoughts; they become words. Watch your words; they become actions. Watch your actions; they become habits. Watch your habits; they become character. Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.
Frank Outlaw

Consider how hard it is to change yourself and you'll understand what little chance you have in trying to change others.
Jacob M. Braude

I think psychedelics play a major part in what we do, but having said that, I feel that if somebody's going to experiment with those things they really need to educate themselves about them. People just taking the chemicals and diving in without having any kind of preparation about what they're about to experience tend to have no frame of reference, so they're missing everything flying by and all these new perspectives. It's just a waste. They reach a little bit of spiritual enlightenment, but they end up going, 'Well, now I need that drug to get back there again.' The trick is to use the drugs once to get there, and maybe spend the next ten years trying to get back there without the drug.
Maynard James Keenan

Habits are first cobwebs, then cables.
Spanish proverb

People spend a lifetime searching for happiness; looking for peace. They chase idle dreams, addictions, religions, even other people, hoping to fill the emptiness that plagues them. The irony is the only place they ever needed to search was within.
Ramona L. Anderson

A habit is a shirt made of iron.
Czech proverb

Our sickness is between our ears.
Anonymous

In the course of history many more people have died for their drink and their dope than have died for their religion or their country.
Aldous Huxley

All sin tends to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is what is called damnation
W. H. Auden

Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism.
Carl Gustav Jung

My case is a species of madness, only that it is a derangement of the Volition, and not of the intellectual faculties.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

All drugs of any interest to any moderately intelligent person in America are now illegal.
Thomas Szasz

A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is.... A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in.
C. S. Lewis

Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism.
Carl Jung

All men are tempted. There is no man that lives that can't be broken down, provided it is the right temptation, put in the right spot.
Henry Ward Beecher

What makes resisting temptation difficult for many people is they don't want to discourage it completely.
Franklin P. Jones

He does not need opium. He has the gift of reverie.
Anais Nin

If an addict who has been completely cured starts smoking again he no longer experiences the discomfort of his first addiction. There exists, therefore, outside alkaloids and habit, a sense for opium, an intangible habit which lives on, despite the recasting of the organism. The dead drug leaves a ghost behind. At certain hours it haunts the house.
Jean Cocteau

Nothing makes it easier to resist temptation than a proper bringing-up, a sound set of values - and witnesses.
Franklin P. Jones

Addiction, obesity, starvation (anorexia nervosa) are political problems, not psychiatric: each condense and expresses a contest between the individual and some other person or persons in his environment over the control of the individual’s body.
Thomas Szasz

There is nothing more helpless and irresponsible than a man in the depths of an ether binge.
Hunter S. Thompson

Habit, if not resisted, soon becomes necessity.
St. Augustine

Treat your mind like a bad neighborhood - don't go there alone.
Anonymous

If addiction is judged by how long a dumb animal will sit pressing a lever to get a 'fix' of something, to its own detriment, then I would conclude that netnews is far more addictive than cocaine.
Rob Stampfli

Whether talking about addiction, taxation [on cigarettes] or education [about smoking], there is always at the center of the conversation an essential conundrum: How come we’re selling this deadly stuff anyway?
Anna Quindlen

Anyway, no drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power.
P. J. O'Rourke

I am not addicted to nicotine. Why must I participate in your drug addiction?
Ken Faver

We love our habits more than our income, often more than our life.
Bertrand Russell

For many, negative thinking is a habit, which over time, becomes an addiction... A lot of people suffer from this disease because negative thinking is addictive to each of the Big Three -- the mind, the body, and the emotions. If one doesn't get you, the others are waiting in the wings.
Peter McWilliams

If I can't see you, feel you or touch you. Do you really exist outside my mind?
Carl Stoynoff

Power is the faculty or capacity to act, the strength and potency to accomplish something. It is the vital energy to make choices and decisions. It also includes the capacity to overcome deeply embedded habits and to cultivate higher, more effective ones.
Stephen R. Covey

Thoughts lead on to purposes; purposes go forth in action; actions form habits; habits decide character; and character fixes our destiny.
Tryon Edwards

Have you heard about the latest 12 step group for compulsive talkers? It's called ... On and On Anonymous.
Anonymous

If an addict who has been completely cured starts smoking again he no longer experiences the discomfort of his first addiction. There exists, therefore, outside alkaloids and habit, a sense for opium, an intangible habit which lives on, despite the recasting of the organism. The dead drug leaves a ghost behind. At certain hours it haunts the house.
Jean Cocteau

Better shun the bait than struggle in the snare.
John Dryden

The unfortunate thing about this world is that good habits are so much easier to give up than bad ones.
Somerset Maugham

We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others that in the end we become disguised to ourselves.
Francois Duc de La Rochefoucauld

Don't do drugs because if you do drugs you'll go to prison, and drugs are really expensive in prison.
John Hardwick

Not being able to govern events, I govern myself.
Michel de Montaigne

A man’s fortune has its form given to it by his habits.
Anonymous

Self-respect is the root of discipline: The sense of dignity grows with the ability to say no to oneself.
Abraham Joshua Heschel

It's all right letting yourself go, as long as you can get yourself back.
Mick Jagger

The weapons addiction of all our political leaders ... has the same characteristics as drug addiction. It is enormously costly, very dangerous, provokes ugly violence, and is self-perpetuating -- all on a scale far greater than drug addicton.
Howard Zinn

First we form habits, then they form us. Conquer your bad habits or they will conquer you.
Rob Gilbert

I feel that any form of so called psychotherapy is strongly contraindicated for addicts. The question ''Why did you start using narcotics in the first place?'' should never be asked. It is quite as irrelevant to treatment as it would be to ask a malarial patient why he went to a malarial area.
William S. Burroughs

To possess your soul in patience, with all the skin and some of the flesh burnt off your face and hands, is a job for a boy compared with the pains of a man who has lived pretty long in the exhilarating world that drugs or strong waters seem to create and is trying to live now in the first bald desolation created by knocking them off.
C. E. Montague

You can turn your back on a person, but never turn your back on a drug, especially when its waving a razor sharp hunting knife in your eye.
Hunter S. Thompson

Habits… the only reason they persist is that they are offering some satisfaction… You allow them to persist by not seeking any other, better form of satisfying the same needs. Every habit, good or bad, is acquired and learned in the same way - by finding that it is a means of satisfaction.
Juliene Berk

Saigon was an addicted city, and we were the drug: the corruption of children, the mutilation of young men, the prostitution of women, the humiliation of the old, the division of the family, the division of the country-it had all been done in our name... The French city... had represented the opium stage of the addiction. With the Americans had begun the heroin phase.
James Fenton

If we resist our passions, it is more because of their weakness than because of our strength.
Francois, duc de La Rochefoucauld