"The art of being wise is knowing what to overlook."
— William James

"The greatest discovery of any generation is that a human can alter his life by altering his attitude."
— William James

"Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action. "
— William James

"A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices."
— William James

"The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it."
— William James

"Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does."
— William James

"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."
— William James

"Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact."
— William James

"Often people look like they are thinking, when in reality they are merely rearranging their prejudices"
— William James

"Human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives."
— William James

"The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another."
— William James

"Anything you may hold firmly in your imagination can be yours."
— William James

"If you can change your mind, you can change your life."
— William James

"“We don’t laugh because we’re happy, we’re happy because we laugh.”"
— William James

"To change one’s life:
1. Start immediately.
2. Do it flamboyantly.
3. No exceptions."
— William James

"Wherever you are, it is your friends who make your world."
— William James

"I am done with great things and big things, great institutions and big success, and I am for those tiny, invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, yet which if you give them time, will rend the hardest monuments of man's pride."
— William James

"Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact."
— William James

"Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way."
— William James (The Writings of William James: A Comprehensive Edition)

"The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated."
— William James

"Begin to be now what you will be hereafter. "
— William James

"Science, like life, feeds on its own decay. New facts burst old rules; then newly divined conceptions bind old and new together into a reconciling law."
— William James (The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy)

"There are no differences but differences of degree between different degrees of difference and no difference."
— William James

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

"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,"
— William James

"[There are, in us] possibilities that take our breath away, and show a world wider than either physics or philistine ethics can imagine. Here is a world in which all is well, in spite of certain forms of death, death of hope, death of strength, death of responsibility, of fear and wrong, death of everything that paganism, naturalism and legalism pin their trust on."
— William James

"I am done with great things and big plans, great institutions and big success. I am for those tiny, invisible, loving, human forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, which, if given time, will rend the hardest monuments of pride."
— William James

"...do every day or two something for no other reason that 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."
— William James (Habit)

"Religion is a monumental chapter in the history of human egoism."
— William James

"A great nation is not saved by wars, it is saved by acts without external picturesqueness; by speaking, writing, voting reasonably; by smiting corruption swiftly; by good temper between parties; by the people knowing true men when they see them, and preferring them as leaders to rabid partisans and empty quacks."
— William James

"Act as if what you do make a difference. It does."
— William James

"Whenever two people meet, there are really six people present. There is each man as he sees himself, each man as the other person sees him, and each man as he really is."
— William James

"I am no lover of disorder and doubt as such. Rather I fear to lose truth by the pretension to possess it already wholly."
— William James (The Varieties of Religious Experience)

"It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all."
— William James

"Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task."
— William James

"The prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers. "
— William James

"When all is said and done, we are in the end absolutely dependent on the universe; and into sacrifices and surrenders of some sort, deliberately looked at and accepted, we are drawn and pressed as into our only permanent positions of repose. Now in those states of mind which fall short of religion, the surrender is submitted to as an imposition of necessity, and the sacrifice is undergone at the very best without complaint. In the religious life, on the contrary, surrender and sacrifice are positively espoused: even unnecessary givings-up are added in order that the happiness may increase. Religion thus makes easy and felicitous what in any case is necessary."
— William James

""Never reject!" - William James to Gertrude Stein"
— William James

"Damn the Absolute!"
— William James

"Knowledge about life is one thing; effective occupation of a place in life, with its dynamic currents passing through your being, is another."
— William James (The Varieties of Religious Experience)

"My experience is what I agree to attend to."
— William James

"There are two lives, the natural and the spiritual, and we must lose the one before we can participate in the other."
— William James (The Varieties of Religious Experience)

"Actions seems to follow feeling, but really actions and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not. Thus the sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there."
— William James

"The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS. That - with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word 'success' - is our national disease.
"
— William James

"Seek out that particular mental attribute which makes you feel most deeply and vitally alive, along with which comes the inner voice which says, 'This is the real me,' and when you have found that attitude, follow it."
— William James

"Pragmatism asks its usual question. "Grant an idea or belief to be true," it says, "what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone's actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth's cash-value in experiential terms?""
— William James

"If this life is not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight."
— William James

"This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it."
— William James

"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."
— William James (The Principles of Psychology)

"Believe that life is worth living and that belief will help create the fact"
— William James