William James

“Is life worth living? It all depends on the liver.”

“We can act as if there were a God; feel as if we were free; consider Nature as if she were full of special designs; lay plans as if we were to be immortal; and we find then that these words do make a genuine difference in our moral life.”

“No matter how full a reservoir of maxims one may possess, and no matter how good one's sentiments may be, if one has not taken advantage of every concrete opportunity to act, one's character may remain entirely unaffected for the better.”

“The sentiment of reality can indeed attach itself so strongly to our object of belief that our whole life is polarized through and through, so to speak, by its sense of the existence of the thing believed in, and yet that thing, for the purpose of definite description, can hardly be said to be present to our mind at all.”

“Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.”

“Let sanguine healthy-mindedness do its best with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and forgetting, still the evil background is really there to be thought of, and the skull will grin in at the banquet.”

“It is our attitude at the beginning of a difficult task which, more than anything else, will affect its successful outcome.”

“Take the happiest man, the one most envied by the world, and in nine cases out of ten his inmost consciousness is one of failure. Either his ideals in the line of his achievements are pitched far higher than the achievements themselves, or else he has secret ideals of which the world knows nothing, and in regard to which he inwardly knows himself to be found wanting.”

“The greatest use of a life is to spend it on something that will outlast it.”

“Conversion is in its essence a normal adolescent phenomenon, incidental to the passage from the child's small universe to the wider intellectual and spiritual life of maturity.”

“Be willing to have it so. Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.”

“The collective name for the ripe fruits of religion in a character is Saintliness. The saintly character is the character for which spiritual emotions are the habitual centre of the personal energy; and there is a certain composite photograph of universal saintliness, the same in all religions, of which the features can easily be traced.”

“I don't sing because I'm happy; I'm happy because I sing.”

“There is but one cause of human failure. And that is man's lack of faith in his true Self.”

“A paradise of inward tranquility seems to be faith's usual result.”

“The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.”

“There is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it.”

“If you believe that feeling bad or worrying long enough will change a past or future event, then you are residing on another planet with a different reality system.”

“If you want a quality, act as if you already had it.”

“We must frankly confess, then, using our empirical common sense and ordinary practical prejudices, that in the world that actually is, the virtues of sympathy, charity, and non-resistance may be, and often have been, manifested in excess. … You will agree to this in general, for in spite of the Gospel, in spite of Quakerism, in spite of Tolstoi, you believe in fighting fire with fire, in shooting down usurpers, locking up thieves, and freezing out vagabonds and swindlers.”

“Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not.”

“If things are ever to move upward, some one must take the first step, and assume the risk of it. No one who is not willing to try charity, to try non-resistance as the saint is always willing, can tell whether these methods will or will not succeed.”

“There is but one cause of human failure. And that is man's lack of faith in his true Self.”

“But petitional prayer is only one department of prayer; and if we take the word in the wider sense as meaning every kind of inward communion or conversation with the power recognized as divine, we can easily see that scientific criticism leaves it untouched. Prayer in this wide sense is the very soul and essence of religion.”

“Whenever you're in conflict with someone, there is one factor that can make the difference between damaging your relationship and deepening it. That factor is attitude.”

“The world of our experience consists at all times of two parts, an objective and a subjective part, of which the former may be incalculably more extensive than the latter, and yet the latter can never be omitted or suppressed. The objective part is the sum total of whatsoever at any given time we may be thinking of, the subjective part is the inner "state" in which the thinking comes to pass.”

“Belief creates the actual fact.”

“The war against war is going to be no holiday excursion or camping party. The military feelings are too deeply grounded to abdicate their place among our ideals until better substitutes are offered than the glory and shame that come to nations as well as to individuals from the ups and downs of politics and the vicissitudes of trade.”

“Why should we think upon things that are lovely? Because thinking determines life. It is a common habit to blame life upon the environment. Environment modifies life but does not govern life. The soul is stronger than its surroundings.”

“History is a bath of blood.”

“To change ones life: Start immediately. Do it flamboyantly.”

“Alexander's career was piracy pure and simple, nothing but an orgy of power and plunder, made romantic by the character of the hero. There was no rational purpose in it, and the moment he died his generals and governors attacked one another.”

“Success or failure depends more upon attitude than upon capacity successful men act as though they have accomplished or are enjoying something. Soon it becomes a reality. Act, look, feel successful, conduct yourself accordingly, and you will be amazed at the positive results.”

“Success or failure depends more upon attitude than upon capacity successful men act as though they have accomplished or are enjoying something. Soon it becomes a reality. Act, look, feel successful, conduct yourself accordingly, and you will be amazed at the positive results.”

“At the present day, civilized opinion is a curious mental mixture. The military instincts and ideals are as strong as ever, but they are confronted by reflective criticisms which sorely curb their ancient freedom. Innumerable writers are showing up the bestial side of military service. Pure loot and mastery seem no longer morally allowable motives, and pretexts must be found for attributing them solely to the enemy.”

“Begin to be now what you will be hereafter.”

“Inferiority is always with us, and merciless scorn of it is the keynote of the military temper.”

“Time itself comes in drops.”

“For the philosophy which is so important in each of us is not a technical matter; it is our more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means. It is only partly got from books; it is our individual way of just seeing and feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos.”

“Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation.”

“Man can alter his life by altering his thinking.”

“No particular results then, so far, but only an attitude of orientation, is what the pragmatic method means. The attitude of looking away from first things, principles, 'categories,' supposed necessities; and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts.”

“If the grace of God miraculously operates, it probably operates through the subliminal door.”

“The trail of the human serpent is thus over everything.”

“If merely 'feeling good' could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.”

“There can be no difference anywhere that doesn't make a difference elsewhere - no difference in abstract truth that doesn't express itself in a difference in concrete fact and in conduct consequent upon that fact, imposed on somebody, somehow, somewhere and somewhen.”

“Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.”

“It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.”

“There is but one cause of human failure. And that is man's lack of faith in his true Self.”

“I myself believe that the evidence for God lies primarily in inner personal experiences.”

“Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.”

“Our minds thus grow in spots; and like grease-spots, the spots spread. But we let them spread as little as possible: we keep unaltered as much of our old knowledge, as many of our old prejudices and beliefs, as we can. We patch and tinker more than we renew. The novelty soaks in; it stains the ancient mass; but it is also tinged by what absorbs it.”

“Our faith is faith in someone else's faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case.”

“First, you know, a new theory is attacked as absurd; then it is admitted to be true, but obvious and insignificant; finally it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim that they themselves discovered it.”

“If you believe that feeling bad or worrying long enough will change a past or future event, then you are residing on another planet with a different reality system.”

“Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process: the process namely of its verifying itself, its veri-fication. Its validity is the process of its valid-ation.”

“The greatest discovery of any generation is that a human can alter his life by altering his attitude.”

“It is wrong always, everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.”

“Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs 'pass,' so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them.”

“A man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him.”

“The "through-and-through" universe seems to suffocate me with its infallible impeccable all-pervasiveness. Its necessity, with no possibilities; its relations, with no subjects, make me feel as if I had entered into a contract with no reserved rights … It seems too buttoned-up and white-chokered and clean-shaven a thing to speak for the vast slow-breathing unconscious Kosmos with its dread abysses and its unknown tides.”

“To be conscious means not simply to be, but to be reported, known, to have awareness of one's being added to that being.”

“The truth remains that, after adolescence has begun, "words, words, words," must constitute a large part, and an always larger part as life advances, of what the human being has to learn.”

“Do something everyday for no other reason than you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test.”

“It is an odd circumstance that neither the old nor the new, by itself, is interesting; the absolutely old is insipid; the absolutely new makes no appeal at all. The old in the new is what claims the attention,—the old with a slightly new turn.”

“The sovereign cure for worry is prayer.”

“Democracy is still upon its trial. The civic genius of our people is its only bulwark.”

“Individuality is founded in feeling; and the recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making, and directly perceive how events happen, and how work is actually done.”

“So long as antimilitarists propose no substitute for war's disciplinary function, no moral equivalent of war, analogous, as one might say, to the mechanical equivalent of heat, so long they fail to realize the full inwardness of the situation.”

“The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour.”

“Our colleges ought to have lit up in us a lasting relish for the better kind of man, a loss of appetite for mediocrities, and a disgust for cheapjacks. We ought to smell, as it were, the difference of quality in men and their proposals when we enter the world of affairs about us.”

“The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.”

“We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause.”

“Real culture lives by sympathies and admirations, not by dislikes and disdain — under all misleading wrappings it pounces unerringly upon the human core.”

“Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state.”

“The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal.”

“Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things. In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf.”

“I wished, by treating Psychology like a natural science, to help her to become one.”

“Those thoughts are truth which guide us to beneficial interaction with sensible particulars as they occur, whether they copy these in advance or not.”

“I have often thought that the best way to define a man's character would be to seek out the particular mental or moral attitude in which, when it came upon him, he felt himself most deeply and intensely active and alive. At such moments there is a voice inside which speaks and says: "This is the real me!"”

“Our esteem for facts has not neutralized in us all religiousness. It is itself almost religious. Our scientific temper is devout.”

“Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.”

“The hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioned our characters in the wrong way.”

“The difference between the first- and second-best things in art absolutely seems to escape verbal definition — it is a matter of a hair, a shade, an inward quiver of some kind — yet what miles away in the point of preciousness!”

“An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force of revelation.”

“Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness, and of their soul's resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole bodily organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger. Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.”

“Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs pass, so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them.”

“Success or failure depends more upon attitude than upon capacity successful men act as though they have accomplished or are enjoying something. Soon it becomes a reality. Act, look, feel successful, conduct yourself accordingly, and you will be amazed at the positive results.”

“The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS. That — with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word success — is our national disease.”

“Knowledge about life is one thing; effective occupation of a place in life, with its dynamic currents passing through your being, is another.”

“An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible.”

“One hearty laugh together will bring enemies into a closer communion of heart than hours spent on both sides in inward wrestling with the mental demon of uncharitable feeling.”

“Where quality is the thing sought after, the thing of supreme quality is cheap, whatever the price one has to pay for it.”

“There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied upon to do, and that is to contradict other philosophers.”

“There is an organic affinity between joyousness and tenderness, and their companionship in the saintly life need in no way occasion surprise.”

“The ideas gained by men before they are twenty-five are practically the only ideas they shall have in their lives.”

“Knowledge about life is one thing; effective occupation of a place in life, with its dynamic currents passing through your being, is another.”

“What every genuine philosopher (every genuine man, in fact) craves most is praise although the philosophers generally call it recognition!”

“In the dim background of mind we know what we ought to be doing but somehow we cannot start.”

“'Pure experience' is the name I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories.”

“To spend life for something which outlasts it.”

“Truth is what works.”

“The aim of a college education is to teach you to know a good man when you see one.”

“Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.”

“An outree explanation, violating all our preconceptions, would never pass for a true account of a novelty. We should scratch round industriously till we found something less excentric.”

“It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all. And often enough our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true.”

“To study the abnormal is the best way of understanding the normal.”

“We never fully grasp the import of any true statement until we have a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement would be.”

“The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments.”

“Many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.”

“How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure.”

“In business for yourself, not by yourself.”

“Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has no use. No faith in anything of that cheap kind!”

“Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is theoretically possible.”

“Genius... means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.”

“There must be something solemn, serious, and tender about any attitude which we denominate religious. If glad, it must not grin or snicker; if sad, it must not scream or curse.”

“To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced.”

“We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable.”

“If any organism fails to fulfill its potentialities, it becomes sick.”

“Man lives for science as well as bread.”

“The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.”

“The world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck.”

“Every man who possibly can should force himself to a holiday of a full month in a year, whether he feels like taking it or not.”

“The 'I think' which Kant said must be able to accompany all my objects, is the 'I breathe' which actually does accompany them.”

“To be a real philosopher all that is necessary is to hate some one else's type of thinking.”

“Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly.”

“The greatest use of a life is to spend it on something that will outlast it.”

“The world we see that seems so insane is the result of a belief system that is not working. To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our minds.”

“Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.”

“Begin to be now what you will be hereafter.”

“It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all. And often enough our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true.”

“A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and life is after all a chain.”

“The aim of a college education is to teach you to know a good man when you see one.”

“The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes.”

“Why should we think upon things that are lovely? Because thinking determines life. It is a common habit to blame life upon the environment. Environment modifies life but does not govern life. The soul is stronger than its surroundings.”

“It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all. And often enough our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true.”

“Action may not bring happiness but there is no happiness without action.”

“See the exquisite contrast of the types of mind! The pragmatist clings to facts and concreteness, observes truth at its work in particular cases, and generalises. Truth, for him, becomes a class-name for all sorts of definite working-values in experience. For the rationalist it remains a pure abstraction, to the bare name of which we must defer. When the pragmatist undertakes to show in detail just why we must defer, the rationalist is unable to recognise the concretes from which his own abstraction is taken. He accuses us of denying truth; whereas we have only sought to trace exactly why people follow it and always ought to follow it. Your typical ultra-abstractions fairly shudders at concreteness: other things equal, he positively prefers the pale and spectral. If the two universes were offered, he would always choose the skinny outline rather than the rich thicket of reality. It is so much purer, clearer, nobler.”

“There must be something solemn, serious, and tender about any attitude which we denominate religious. If glad, it must not grin or snicker; if sad, it must not scream or curse.”

“If you want a quality, act as if you already had it.”

“To change ones life: Start immediately. Do it flamboyantly.”

“Your hopes, dreams and aspirations are legitimate. They are trying to take you airborne, above the clouds, above the storms, if you only let them.”

“The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.”

“The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes.”

“Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.”

“Pessimism leads to weakness, optimism to power.”

“We don't laugh because we're happy - we're happy because we laugh.”

“Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.”

“Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.”

“This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it.”

“Most people never run far enough on their first wind to find out they've got a second.”

“When you have to make a choice and don't make it, that is in itself a choice.”

“A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.”

“The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.”

“We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood.”

“We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause.”

“The world we see that seems so insane is the result of a belief system that is not working. To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our minds.”

“Compared to what we ought to be, we are half awake.”

“Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action. ”

“Let everything you do be done as if it makes a difference.”

“There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.”

“Human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind.”

“The best argument I know for an immortal life is the existence of a man who deserves one.”

“If you care enough for a result, you will most certainly attain it.”

“Success or failure depends more upon attitude than upon capacity successful men act as though they have accomplished or are enjoying something. Soon it becomes a reality. Act, look, feel successful, conduct yourself accordingly, and you will be amazed at the positive results.”

“A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and life is after all a chain.”

“Action may not bring happiness but there is no happiness without action.”

“Everybody should do at least two things each day that he hates to do, just for practice.”

“Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.”

“The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes.”

“The god whom science recognizes must be a God of universal laws exclusively, a God who does a wholesale, not a retail business. He cannot accommodate his processes to the convenience of individuals.”

“The greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths.”

“Is life worth living? It all depends on the liver.”

“No matter how full a reservoir of maxims one may possess, and no matter how good one's sentiments may be, if one has not taken advantage of every concrete opportunity to act, one's character may remain entirely unaffected for the better.”

“Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.”

“It is our attitude at the beginning of a difficult task which, more than anything else, will affect its successful outcome.”

“The greatest use of a life is to spend it on something that will outlast it.”

“It is our attitude at the beginning of a difficult task which, more than anything else, will affect its successful outcome.”

“Be willing to have it so. Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.”

“I don't sing because I'm happy; I'm happy because I sing.”

“The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.”

“If you want a quality, act as if you already had it.”

“Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not.”

“There is but one cause of human failure. And that is man's lack of faith in his true Self.”

“Whenever you're in conflict with someone, there is one factor that can make the difference between damaging your relationship and deepening it. That factor is attitude.”

“If you care enough for a result, you will most certainly attain it.”

“Belief creates the actual fact.”

“Whenever you're in conflict with someone, there is one factor that can make the difference between damaging your relationship and deepening it. That factor is attitude.”

“Why should we think upon things that are lovely? Because thinking determines life. It is a common habit to blame life upon the environment. Environment modifies life but does not govern life. The soul is stronger than its surroundings.”

“To change ones life: Start immediately. Do it flamboyantly.”

“Success or failure depends more upon attitude than upon capacity successful men act as though they have accomplished or are enjoying something. Soon it becomes a reality. Act, look, feel successful, conduct yourself accordingly, and you will be amazed at the positive results.”

“Begin to be now what you will be hereafter.”

“Time itself comes in drops.”

“The world we see that seems so insane is the result of a belief system that is not working. To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our minds.”

“Man can alter his life by altering his thinking.”

“If the grace of God miraculously operates, it probably operates through the subliminal door.”

“If merely 'feeling good' could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.”

“It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.”

“Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.”

“Our faith is faith in someone else's faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case.”

“If you believe that feeling bad or worrying long enough will change a past or future event, then you are residing on another planet with a different reality system.”

“It is wrong always, everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.”

“A man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him.”

“The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.”

“To be conscious means not simply to be, but to be reported, known, to have awareness of one's being added to that being.”

“To change ones life: Start immediately. Do it flamboyantly.”

“Do something everyday for no other reason than you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test.”

“The sovereign cure for worry is prayer.”

“Individuality is founded in feeling; and the recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making, and directly perceive how events happen, and how work is actually done.”

“The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour.”

“We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause.”

“Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state.”

“Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things. In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf.”

“Those thoughts are truth which guide us to beneficial interaction with sensible particulars as they occur, whether they copy these in advance or not.”

“'Pure experience' is the name I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories.”

“Our esteem for facts has not neutralized in us all religiousness. It is itself almost religious. Our scientific temper is devout.”

“I think that yesterday was a crisis in my life. I finished the first part of Renouvier's second Essais and see no reason why his definition of free will—"the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts"—need be the definition of an illusion. At any rate, I will assume for the present—until next year—that it is no illusion. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.”

“The hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioned our characters in the wrong way.”

“All our scientific and philosophic ideals are altars to unknown gods.”

“An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force of revelation.”

“Freedom is only necessity understood.”

“Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs pass, so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them.”

“What interest, zest, or excitement can there be in achieving the right way, unless we are enabled to feel that the wrong way is also a possible and a natural way, — nay, more, a menacing and an imminent way? And what sense can there be in condemning ourselves for taking the wrong way, unless we need have done nothing of the sort, unless the right way was open to us as well? I cannot understand the willingness to act, no matter how we feel, without the belief that acts are really good and bad.”

“An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible.”

“The most any one can do is to confess as candidly as he can the grounds for the faith that is in him, and leave his example to work on others as it may.”

“One hearty laugh together will bring enemies into a closer communion of heart than hours spent on both sides in inward wrestling with the mental demon of uncharitable feeling.”

“Old-fashioned determinism was what we may call hard determinism. It did not shrink from such words as fatality, bondage of the will, necessitation, and the like. Nowadays, we have a soft determinism which abhors harsh words, and, repudiating fatality, necessity, and even predetermination, says that its real name is freedom; for freedom is only necessity understood, and bondage to the highest is identical with true freedom”

“if you can change your mind, you can change your life.”

“Where quality is the thing sought after, the thing of supreme quality is cheap, whatever the price one has to pay for it.”

“The stronghold of the determinist argument is the antipathy to the idea of chance...This notion of alternative possibility, this admission that any one of several things may come to pass is, after all, only a roundabout name for chance.”

“There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied upon to do, and that is to contradict other philosophers.”

“"What is meant by saying that my choice of which way to walk home after the lecture is ambiguous and matter of chance?...It means that both Divinity Avenue and Oxford Street are called but only one, and that one either one, shall be chosen.”

“There is an organic affinity between joyousness and tenderness, and their companionship in the saintly life need in no way occasion surprise.”

“We have nothing to do but to receive, resting absolutely upon the merit, power, and love of our Redeemer.”

“The ideas gained by men before they are twenty-five are practically the only ideas they shall have in their lives.”

“Every way of classifying a thing is but a way of handling it for some particular purpose.”

“Knowledge about life is one thing; effective occupation of a place in life, with its dynamic currents passing through your being, is another.”

“Pretend what we may, the whole man within us is at work when we form our philosophical opinions. Intellect, will, taste, and passion co-operate just as they do in practical affairs; and lucky it is if the passion be not something as petty as a love of personal conquest over the philosopher across the way.”

“What every genuine philosopher (every genuine man, in fact) craves most is praise although the philosophers generally call it recognition!”

“The concrete man has but one interest — to be right. That to him is the art of all arts, and all means are fair which help him to it.”

“In the dim background of mind we know what we ought to be doing but somehow we cannot start.”

“How you produce volume after volume the way you do is more than I can conceive. ...But you haven't to forge every sentence in the teeth of irreducible and stubborn facts as I do. It is like walking through the densest brush wood.”

“'Pure experience' is the name I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories.”

“We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause.”

“Belief creates the actual fact.”

“The ideas gained by men before they are twenty-five are practically the only ideas they shall have in their lives.”

“To spend life for something which outlasts it.”

“There is but one indefectibly certain truth, and that is the truth that pyrrhonistic scepticism itself leaves standing, — the truth that the present phenomenon of consciousness exists.”

“Truth is what works.”

“In my individual heart I fully believe my faith is as robust as yours. The trouble with your robust and full bodied faiths, however, is, that they begin to cut each others throats too soon, and for getting on in the world and establishing a modus vivendi these pestilential refinements and reasonablenesses and moderations have to creep in.”

“The aim of a college education is to teach you to know a good man when you see one.”

“Wherever you are it is your own friends who make your world.”

“It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all. And often enough our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true.”

“Tell him to live by yes and no — yes to everything good, no to everything bad.”

“To study the abnormal is the best way of understanding the normal.”

“Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor.”

“We never fully grasp the import of any true statement until we have a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement would be.”

“The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.”

“The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments.”

“There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.”

“Many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.”

“The hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioning our characters in the wrong way.”

“How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure.”

“We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar. ...Nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out.”

“In business for yourself, not by yourself.”

“The study a posteriori of the distribution of consciousness shows it to be exactly such as we might expect in an organ added for the sake of steering a nervous system grown too complex to regulate itself.”

“Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has no use. No faith in anything of that cheap kind!”

“Begin to be now what you will be hereafter.”

“The total possible consciousness may be split into parts which co-exist but mutually ignore each other.”

“Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is theoretically possible.”

“Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped up in bits … A 'river' or a 'stream' are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life.”

“Genius... means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.”

“As we take, in fact, a general view of the wonderful stream of our consciousness, what strikes us first is this different pace of its parts. Like a bird's life, it seems to be made of an alternation of flights and perchings.”

“There must be something solemn, serious, and tender about any attitude which we denominate religious. If glad, it must not grin or snicker; if sad, it must not scream or curse.”

“As the brain-changes are continuous, so do all these consciousnesses melt into each other like dissolving views. Properly they are but one protracted consciousness, one unbroken stream.”

“To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced.”

“The last peculiarity of consciousness to which attention is to be drawn in this first rough description of its stream is that it is always interested more in one part of its object than in another, and welcomes and rejects, or chooses, all the while it thinks.”

“We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable.”

“An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible.”

“If any organism fails to fulfill its potentialities, it becomes sick.”

“In its widest possible sense, however, a man's Self is the sum total of all that he can call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house, his wife and children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his lands and horses, and yacht and bank-account. All these things give him the same emotions. If they wax and prosper, he feels triumphant; if they dwindle and die away, he feels cast down.”

“Man lives for science as well as bread.”

“Properly speaking, a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognise him.”

“The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.”

“So our self-feeling in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do.”

“The world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck.”

“Creatures extremely low in the intellectual scale may have conception. All that is required is that they should recognize the same experience again. A polyp would be a conceptual thinker if a feeling of 'Hello! thingumbob again!' ever flitted through its mind.”

“Every man who possibly can should force himself to a holiday of a full month in a year, whether he feels like taking it or not.”

“The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion; and to the very end of life, our location of all things in one space is due to the fact that the original extents or bignesses of all the sensations which came to our notice at once, coalesced together into one and the same space.”

“The 'I think' which Kant said must be able to accompany all my objects, is the 'I breathe' which actually does accompany them.”

“Let any one try, I will not say to arrest, but to notice or attend to, the present moment of time. One of the most baffling experiences occurs. Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming.”

“To be a real philosopher all that is necessary is to hate some one else's type of thinking.”

“Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.”

“Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly.”

“The impulse to take life strivingly is indestructible in the race.”

“The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.”

“My thinking is first and last and always for the sake of my doing.”

“The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes.”

“The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.”

“Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.”

“The more rational statement is that we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and not that we cry, strike, or tremble, because we are sorry, angry, or fearful, as the case may be. Without the bodily states following on the perception, the latter would be purely cognitive in form, pale, colorless, destitute of emotional warmth.”

“Pessimism leads to weakness, optimism to power.”

“A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity.”

“We don't laugh because we're happy - we're happy because we laugh.”

“A thing is important if anyone think it important.”

“Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.”

“In the deepest heart of all of us there is a corner in which the ultimate mystery of things works sadly.”

“Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.”

“Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.”

“Need and struggle are what excite and inspire us; our hour of triumph is what brings the void. Not the Jews of the captivity, but those of the days of Solomon's glory are those from whom the pessimistic utterances in our Bible come.”

“This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it.”

“It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all. And often enough our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true.”

“Most people never run far enough on their first wind to find out they've got a second.”

“This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it, from the moral point of view.”

“When you have to make a choice and don't make it, that is in itself a choice.”

“If this life be not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight.”

“A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.”

“Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.”

“The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.”

“Man's chief difference from the brutes lies in the exuberant excess of his subjective propensities — his preeminence over them simply and solely in the number and in the fantastic and unnecessary character of his wants, physical, moral, aesthetic, and intellectual. Had his whole life not been a quest for the superfluous, he would never have established himself as inexpugnably as he has done in the necessary.”

“We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood.”

“All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experience.”

“This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it.”

“The world we see that seems so insane is the result of a belief system that is not working. To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our minds.”

“An unlearned carpenter of my acquaintance once said in my hearing: "There is very little difference between one man and another; but what little there is, is very important." This distinction seems to me to go to the root of the matter.”

“Compared to what we ought to be, we are half awake.”

“As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use.”

“Let everything you do be done as if it makes a difference.”

“Objective evidence and certitude are doubtless very fine ideals to play with, but where on this moonlit and dream-visited planet are they found?”

“Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly. The fundamental conceptions of psychology are practically very clear to us, but theoretically they are very confused, and one easily makes the obscurest assumptions in this science without realizing, until challenged, what internal difficulties they involve.”

“There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.”

“Everything which is demanded is by that fact a good.”

“Human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind.”

“Possibilities that fail to get realized are, for determinism, pure illusions: they never were possibilities at all. There is nothing inchoate, it says, about this universe of ours, all that was or is or shall be actual having been from eternity virtually there. The cloud of alternatives our minds escort this mass of actuality withal is a cloud of sheer deceptions, to which 'impossibilities' is the only name that rightfully belongs.”

“The best argument I know for an immortal life is the existence of a man who deserves one.”

“Instinct leads, intelligence does but follow.”

“If you care enough for a result, you will most certainly attain it.”

“A difference which makes no difference is no difference at all.”

“A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and life is after all a chain.”

“The most violent revolutions in an individual’s beliefs leave most of his old order standing. Time and space, cause and effect, nature and history, and one’s own biography remain untouched. New truth is always a go-between, a smoother-over of transitions. It marries old opinion to new fact so as ever to show a minimum of jolt, a maximum of continuity.”

“Action may not bring happiness but there is no happiness without action.”

“Who does not see that we are likely to ascertain the distinctive significance of religious melancholy and happiness, or of religious trances, far better by comparing them as conscientiously as we can with other varieties of melancholy, happiness, and trance, than by refusing to consider their place in any more general series, and treating them as if they were outside of nature's order altogether?”

“The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments.”

“Everybody should do at least two things each day that he hates to do, just for practice.”

“Religion, therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine. Since the relation may be either moral, physical, or ritual, it is evident that out of religion in the sense in which we take it, theologies, philosophies, and ecclesiastical organizations may secondarily grow.”

“Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.”

“Religion...is a man's total reaction upon life.”

“The god whom science recognizes must be a God of universal laws exclusively, a God who does a wholesale, not a retail business. He cannot accommodate his processes to the convenience of individuals.”

“There must be something solemn, serious, and tender about any attitude which we denominate religious. If glad, it must not grin or snicker; if sad, it must not scream or curse. It is precisely as being solemn experiences that I wish to interest you in religious experiences. … The divine shall mean for us only such a primal reality as the individual feels impelled to respond to solemnly and gravely, and neither by a curse nor a jest.”

“A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.”

“The greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths.”

“It makes a tremendous emotional and practical difference to one whether one accepts the universe in the drab discolored way of stoic resignation to necessity, or with the passionate happiness of Christian saints.”