William James

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.

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

The sovereign cure for worry is prayer.

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

To spend life for something which outlasts it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

'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.

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.

Man can alter his life by altering his thinking.

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

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

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

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.

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!

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.

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

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

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

Man lives for science as well as bread.

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 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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

In business for yourself, not by yourself.

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

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