William James quotes:

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

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.

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

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.

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

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 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.

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Man can alter his life by altering his thinking.

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

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.

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

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.

Truth is what works.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Begin to be now what you will be hereafter.

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

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

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

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

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.

First... 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.

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

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

The pragmatist turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns toward concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action, and towards power.

Smitten as we are with the vision of social righteousness, a God indifferent to everything but adulation, and full of partiality for his individual favorites, lacks an essential element of largeness.

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.

There is an organic affinity between joyousness and tenderness.

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

When two minds of a high order, interested in kindred subjects, come together, their conversation is chiefly remarkable for the summariness of its allusions and the rapidity of its transitions. Before one of them is half through a sentence the other knows his meaning and replies. ... His mental lungs breathe more deeply, in an atmosphere more broad and vast...

Touch is the alpha and omega of affection.

Ingenuity in meeting and pursuing the pupil, that tact for the concrete situation, though they are the alpha and omega of the teacher's art, are things to which psychology cannot help us in the least.

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

Asceticism may be a mere expression of organic hardihood, disgusted with too much ease.

The greatest revolution of our generation is the discovery that human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.

From the Vedas we learn a practical art of surgery, medicine, music, house building under which mechanized art is included. They are encyclopedia of every aspect of life, culture, religion, science, ethics, law, cosmology and meteorology.

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

Seek out that particular mental attribute which makes you feel most deeply and vitally alive, along with which comes the inner voice which says, 'This is the real me,' and when you have found that attitude, follow it.

Seek out that particular mental attribute which makes you feel most deeply and vitally alive.

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

Every time a resolve or fine glow of feeling evaporates without bearing fruit, it is worse than a chance lost; it works to hinder future emotions from taking the normal path of discharge.

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.

The one who thinks over his experiences most, and weaves them into systematic relations with each other, will be the one with the best memory.

Experience, as we know, has a way of boiling over, and making us correct our present formulas.

The desire to gain wealth and the fear to lose it are our chief breeders of cowardice and propagators of corruption.

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.

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

Why may we not be in the universe, as our dogs and cats are in our drawingrooms and libraries?

We may be in the Universe as dogs and cats are in our libraries, seeing the books and hearing the conversation, but having no inkling of the meaning of it all.

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

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

If you can change your mind, you can change your life.

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

The path to cheerfulness is to sit cheerfully and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there.

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

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.

The prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers.

All the qualities of a man acquire dignity when he knows that the service of the collectivity that owns him needs them. If proud of the collectivity, his own pride rises in proportion. No collectivity is like an army for nourishing such pride....

[Pragmatism's] only test of probable truth is what works best in the way of leading us, what fits every part of life best and combines with the collectivity of experience's demands, nothing being omitted.

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

A sense of humor is just common sense dancing.

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.

A little cooling down of animal excitability and instinct, a little loss of animal toughness, a little irritable weakness and descent of the pain-threshold, will bring the worm at the core of all our usual springs of delight into full view, and turn us into melancholy metaphysicians.

We are stereotyped creatures, imitators and copiers of our past selves.

Our volitional habits depend, then, first, on what the stock of ideas is which we have; and, second, on the habitual coupling of the several ideas with action or inaction respectively.

Cramming seeks to stamp things in by intense application immediately before the ordeal. But a thing thus learned can form but few associations.

The science of logic never made a man reason rightly, and the science of ethics never made a man behave rightly. The most such sciences can do is to help us to catch ourselves up and check ourselves, if we start to reason or to behave wrongly; and to criticise ourselves more articulately after we have made mistakes.

As there is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it, so reasonable arguments, challenges to magnanimity, and appeals to sympathy or justice, are folly when we are dealing with human crocodiles and boa-constrictors.

All the daily routine of life, our dressing and undressing, the coming and going from our work or carrying through of its various operations, is utterly without mental reference to pleasure and pain, except under rarely realized conditions.

There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express volitional deliberation.

In teaching, you must simply work your pupil into such a state of interest in what you are going to teach him that every other object of attention is banished from his mind; then reveal it to him so impressively that he will remember the occasion to his dying day; and finally fill him with devouring curiosity to know what the next steps in connection with the subject are.

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

Truths emerge from facts, but they dip forward into facts again and add to them; which facts again create or reveal new truth (the word is indifferent) and so on indefinitely. The 'facts' themselves meanwhile are not true. They simply are. Truth is the function of the beliefs that start and terminate among them.

In this real world of sweat and dirt, it seems to me that when a view of things is 'noble,' that ought to count as presumption against its truth, and as a philosophic disqualification. The prince of darkness may be a gentleman, as we are told he is, but whatever the God of earth and heaven is, he can surely be no gentleman.

A genius is the man in whom you are least likely to find the power of attending to anything insipid or distasteful in itself. He breaks his engagements, leaves his letters unanswered, neglects his family duties incorrigibly, because he is powerless to turn his attention down and back from those more interesting trains of imagery with which his genius constantly occupies his mind.

Our belief at the beginning of a doubtful undertaking is the one thing that assures the successful outcome of any venture.

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.

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

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

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 bottom of being is left logically opaque to us, a datum in the strict sense of the word, something we simply come upon and find, and about which (if we wish to act) we should pause and wonder as little as possible. In this confession lies the lasting truth of empiricism.

Spiritual energy flows in and produces effects in the phenomenal world.

The transition from tenseness, self-responsibility, and worry, to equanimity, receptivity, and peace, is the most wonderful of all those shiftings of inner equilibrium, those changes of personal centre of energy, which I have analyzed so often; and the chief wonder of it is that it so often comes about, not by doing, but by simply relaxing and throwing the burden down.

The essence of genius is to know what to overlook.

This overcoming of all the usual barriers between the individual and the Absolute is the great mystic achievement. In mystic states we both become one with the Absolute and we become aware of our oneness. This is the everlasting and triumphant mystical tradition, hardly altered by differences of clime or creed.

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

Fatalism, whose solving word in all crises of behavior is All striving is vain, will never reign supreme, for the impulse to take life strivingly is indestructible in the race. Moral creeds which speak to that impulse will be widely successful in spite of inconsistency, vagueness, and shadowy determination of expectancy. Man needs a rule for his will, and will invent one if one be not given him.

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

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

Fear of life in one form or another is the great thing to exorcise.

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.

Divinity lies all around us, but society remains too hidebound to accept that fact...The mother sea and the fountain-head of all religions lies in the mystical experiences of the individual.

Psychology saves us from mistakes. It makes us more clear as to what we are about. We gain confidence in respect to any method which we are using as soon as we believe that it has theory as well as practice at its back.

To improve the golden moment of opportunity, and catch the good that is within our reach, is the great art of life.

Tension is a habit. Relaxing is a habit. Bad habits can be broken, good habits formed.

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.

Religious awe is the same organic thrill which we feel in a forest at twilight, or in a mountain gorge.

Men's activities are occupied into ways -- in grappling with external circumstances and in striving to set things at one in their own topsy-turvy mind.

To neglect the wise sayings of great thinkers is to deny ourselves the truest education.