William James

Let sanguine healthy-mindedness do its best with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and forgetting, still the evil background is really there to be thought of, and the skull will grin in at the banquet.

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

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

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

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.

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

All our scientific and philosophic ideals are altars to unknown gods.

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.

We must be careful not to confuse data with the abstractions we use to analyse them.

Why should we think upon things that are lovely? Because thinking determines life. It is a common habit to blame life upon the environment. Environment modifies life but does not govern life. The soul is stronger than its surroundings.

Serious development of the personality begins at the closet door.

When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank-account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion.

Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. Our fires are damped, our drafts are checked. We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources.

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.

If you give appreciation to people, you win their goodwill. But more important than that, practicing this philosophy has made a different person of me.

If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, you mustn't seek to show that no crows are; it is enough if you prove one single crow to be white.

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

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

Habit simplifies our movements, makes them accurate, and diminishes fatigue.

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.

We must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, and as carefully guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous.