William James Quotes

The sovereign cure for worry is prayer.

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.

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

There are 3 rules to follow if you want to change; (1) Start immediately, (2) Do it flamboyantly, (3) No exceptions.

Wisdom is learning what to overlook.

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

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.

Belief creates the actual fact.

Since you make evil or good by your own thoughts, it is your ruling of your thoughts which proves to be your principal concern.

If you want a quality, act as if you already had it.

The mind is made up by what it feeds upon.

One of the greatest discoveries of our time is that a man can alter the state of their life by altering the state of their mind.

Lives based on having are less free than lives based either on doing or being.

The strenuous life tastes better

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

We don't laugh because we're happy - we're happy because we laugh.

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

There is an organic affinity between joyousness and tenderness.

The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.

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

For the moment, what we attend to is reality.

He who refuses to embrace a unique opportunity loses the prize as surely as if he had failed.

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

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

We with our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest... But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground.

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

Man lives in only one small room of the enormous house of his consciousness.

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

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

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

When thoughts do not neutralize an undesirable emotion, action will.

An enormous mass of experience, both of homeopathic doctors and their patients, is invoked in favor of the efficacy of these remedies and doses.

Of all the beautiful truths pertaining to the soul None is more gladdening or fruitful than to know You can regenerate and make yourself what you will.

If you give appreciation to people, you win their goodwill.

We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, never to be undone.

Act the part and you will become the part.

The greatest discovery of the 20th Century is that our attitude of mind determines our quality of life, not circumstances.

Each of us literally chooses, by his way of attending to things, what sort of universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit.

The instinct of ownership is fundamental in man's nature.

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.

Religion . . . shall mean for us the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude.

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.

Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits.

There is a voice inside which speaks and says, "This is the real me!"

In any project the important factor is your belief. Without belief, there can be no successful outcome.

If it works, it's true.

Given one well-trained physician of the highest type and he will do better work for a thousand people than ten specialists.

The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal.

The glory of medicine is that it is constantly moving forward, that there is always more to learn. The ills of today do not cloud the horizon of tomorrow, but act as a spur to greater effort.

You may not get everything you dream about, but you will never get anything you don't dream about.