Quote #0
Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed down stairs a step at a time.
Mark Twain
About This Quote
The line appears as an epigraph attributed to the fictional "Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar" within Twain’s novel "Pudd’nhead Wilson" (serialized in 1894). Twain later reused the same wording in "Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc" (1895) as part of a narrator’s aside about how difficult it is to stop lying all at once.
Interpretation
Twain’s metaphor suggests that entrenched behaviors rarely disappear through a single decisive act; change is more realistic when it happens gradually, by replacing or reducing the habit in small increments.
Extended Quotation
HABIT is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed down-stairs a step at a time.—Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar.
Variations
You cannot throw habit out of the window; it must be coaxed down-stairs one step at a time.
A habit cannot be tossed out the window; it must be coaxed down the stairs a step at a time.
Misattributions
- Mabel Thatcher Wellman
- Ellen H. Richards
- John Harvey Kellogg
