William James

My experience is what I agree to attend to.

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

A sense of humor is just common sense dancing.

All natural goods perish. Riches take wings; fame is a breath; love is a cheat; youth and health and pleasure vanish.

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.

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

There is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best key to life's significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.

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.

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

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

Be willing to have it so. Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.

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

I am no lover of disorder and doubt as such. Rather do I fear to lose truth by this pretension to possess it already wholly.

Whilst part of what we perceive comes through our senses from the object before us, another part (and it may be the larger part) always comes out of our own mind.

Ninety-nine hundredths or, possibly, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths of our activity is purely automatic and habitual, from our rising in the morning to our lying down each night.

The deepest hunger in human beings is the desire to be appreciated.

All religions begin with the cry Help.

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.

Success or failure depends more upon attitude than upon capacity.

For the moment, what we attend to is reality.

My thinking is first and last and always for the sake of my doing, and I can only do one thing at a time.