William James Quotes
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So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and when his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast.
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The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it." "This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it." "Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.
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At bottom, the whole concern of religion is with the manner of our acceptance of the universe.
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Real servants don't try to use God for their purposes. They let God use them for His purposes.
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Every time a resolve or a fine glow of feeling evaporates without bearing practical fruit is worse than a chance lost; it works so as positively to hinder future resolutions and emotions from taking the normal path of discharge.
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Our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest. The maple and the pine may whisper to each other with their leaves ... But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands also hang together through the ocean's bottom.
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We are stereotyped creatures, imitators and copiers of our past selves.
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So our self-feeling in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do.
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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.
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We need only in cold blood to act as if the thing in question were real and it will infallibly end by growing into such a connection with our life that it will become real.
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The good or bad is not in the circumstance, but only in the mind...that encounters it.
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Equality is attainable as long as you are part of the majority.
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In the matter of belief, we are all extreme conservatives.
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But when all is said and done, the fact remains that some teachers have a naturally inspiring presence and can make their exercises interesting, whilst others simply cannot. And psychology and general pedagogy here confess their failure, and hand things over to the deeper spring of human personality to conduct the task.
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When thoughts do not neutralize an undesirable emotion, action will.
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If you care enough for a result, you will most certainly attain it.
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The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact.
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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.
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It is our attitude at the beginning of a difficult task which, more than anything else, will affect its successful outcome.
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Individuality is founded in feeling
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There is but one unconditional commandment ... to bring about the very largest total universe of good which we can see.
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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.
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When happiness is actually in possession, the thought of evil can no more acquire the feeling of reality than the thought of good can gain reality when melancholy rules. To the man actively happy, from whatever cause, evil simply cannot then and there be believed in.
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The God of many men is little more than their court of appeal against the damnatory judgment passed on their failures by the opinion of the world.