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.

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...

In certain diseased conditions consciousness is a mere spark, without memory of the past or thought of the future, and with the present narrowed down to some one simple emotion or sensation of the body.

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

We don’t laugh because we’re happy – we’re happy because we laugh.

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

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

Beyond the very extreme of fatigue and distress, we may find amounts of ease and power we never dreamed ourselves to own; sources of strength never taxed at all because we never push through the...

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

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

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....

Everyone is familiar with the phenomenon of feeling more or less alive on different days. Everyone knows on any given day that there are energies slumbering in him which the incitements of that day do...

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

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

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

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

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...

No fact in human nature is more characteristic than its willingness to live on a chance. The existence of the chance makes the difference… between a life of which the keynote is resignation and a...

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.

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.

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

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...

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

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

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...

Most people live 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...

To change one’s life: 1. Start immediately. 2. Do it flamboyantly. 3. No exceptions.

A Beethoven string-quartet is truly, as some one has said, a scraping of horses’ tails on cats’ bowels, and may be exhaustively described in such terms; but the application of this description in no way...

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

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

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.

Most of us probably fall several times a day into a fit somewhat like this: The eyes are fixed on vacancy, the sounds of the world melt into a confused unity, the attention is dispersed...

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

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

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...

So you see that the process of education, taken in a large way, may be described as nothing but the process of acquiring ideas or conceptions, the best educated mind being the mind which has...

It may be that no religious reconciliation with the absolute totality of things is possible. Some evils, indeed, are ministerial to higher forms of good; but it may be that there are forms of evil...

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

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.

To spend life for something which outlasts it.

To change one’s life: Begin now. Be bold. No exceptions.

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

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

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

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

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.

Time itself comes in drops.

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

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...

If merely ‘feeling good’ could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.