Life & Wisdom Quote by Jose Bergamin

Bergamin’s line is a neat little philosophical trap: it invites you to reach for the obvious rebuttal (exercise, reading, kindness) and then pulls the floor out from under the whole category of “good habit.” The sting is in “by definition.” He’s not complaining about particular behaviors; he’s attacking the way habit itself works - as an automation of the self. Once something becomes habitual, it stops being chosen. It becomes reflex, and reflex is where moral life goes to die.

The subtext is almost anti-bourgeois. “Good habits” are the favorite vocabulary of institutions that want people legible and manageable: the school, the church, the state, the well-meaning parent. Bergamin, a Spanish writer shaped by the convulsions of the early 20th century and the hard ideological sorting of the Civil War era, had reason to distrust systems that present discipline as virtue. In that light, habit looks less like self-improvement and more like training: a set of grooves cut into a person so they’ll keep moving predictably.

What makes the aphorism work is its absolutism. It’s deliberately unfair, which is the point: he’s using exaggeration to force a distinction between ethics and routine. A “good” act done automatically isn’t quite good in the way we want goodness to be; it’s just behavior that happens to align with a preferred outcome. Bergamin’s provocation is that freedom isn’t a mood, it’s a practice - and habit is the practice of giving that up.