Alternate / Original : The diminutive chains of habit are seldom heavy enough to be felt till they are too strong to be broken.
Saw this one go by on Twitter this morning, and it didn’t feel right. Seems too much like advice, and not the sort of Polonial (ha, I just made that up!) advice like “To thine own self be true,” where it’s directed from one character to another. As a general rule, most of what you’ll find in Shakespeare’s body of work is something that someone said, aloud, to someone else. (True there are soliloquies, and then there’s the sonnets and long poems, but the bulk of the canon is made up of conversation). So ask yourself whether it sounds like something that would have come up in normal conversation.
Turns out, in this case, it’s not. However it’s closer to Shakespeare than you might think.
This quote comes from our old friend Samuel Johnson, sometime in the late 1700’s. Though I cannot find an exact reference to Dr. Johnson’s work, others were quoting him as early as the 1880’s.
In case you missed the Shakespeare connection, you need to go here.