William James

'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.

The sovereign cure for worry is prayer.

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

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

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

I don't sing because I'm happy, I'm happy because I sing.

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

Time itself comes in drops.

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.

Begin to be now what you will be hereafter.

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

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

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

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

Man can alter his life by altering his thinking.

Man lives for science as well as bread.

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.

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

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

Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense dancing.

Pessimism leads to weakness optimism to power.

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

Wisdom is learning what to overlook.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.

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

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

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

Compared to what we ought to be we are half awake.

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

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 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.

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.

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