I will analyze the actionsand appetites of men as if it were a question of lines, of planes,and of solids.

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

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

I, therefore, for one, cannot see my way to accepting the agnostic rules for truth-seeking, or wilfully agree to keep my willing nature out of the game. I cannot do so for this plain reason,...

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

Psychology is the science of mental life

Begin to be now what you will be hereafter.

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

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

The art of being wise is knowing what to overlook.

Most people, probably, are in doubt about certain matters ascribed to their past. They may have seen them, may have said them, done them, or they may only have dreamed or imagined they did so.

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

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

‘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 intelligence cannot wall itself up alive, like a pupa in a chrysalis. It must at any cost keep on speaking terms with the universe that engendered it.

But psychology is passing into a less simple phase. Within a few years what one may call a microscopic psychology has arisen in Germany, carried on by experimental methods, asking of course every moment for...

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

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

All religions and spiritual traditions begin with the cry “Help!

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....

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.

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...

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...

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.

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...

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...