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

"Work usually follows will."

"The God of many men is little more than their court of appeal against the damnatory judgement passed on their failures by the opinion of the world."

"How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure."

"There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision."

"Impulse without reason is not enough and reason without impulse is a poor makeshift."

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

"Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things. In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf."

"If you care enough for a result, you will most certainly attain it."

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

"But it is the bane of psychology to suppose that where results are similar, processes must be the same. Psychologists are too apt to reason as geometers would, if the latter were to say that the diameter of a circle is the same thing as its semi-circumference, because, forsooth, they terminate in the same two points."

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

"To spend life for something which outlasts it."

"The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour."

"An unlearned carpenter of my acquaintance once said in my hearing: 'There is very little difference between one man and another but what there is is very important.'"

"We must judge the tree by its fruit. The best fruits of the religious experience are the best things history has to offer. The highest flights of charity, devotion, trust, patience, and bravery to which the wings of human nature have spread themselves, have all been flown for religious ideals."

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

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

"All religions and spiritual traditions begin with the cry "Help!"

"An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force of revelation."

"Do something everyday for no other reason than 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."

"The exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess Success is our national disease."

"It is as if a man should hesitate indefinitely to ask a certain woman to marry him because he was not perfectly sure that she would prove an angel after he brought her home. Would he not cut himself off from that particular angel-possibility as decisively as if he went and married some one else? Scepticism, then, is not avoidance of option; it is option of a certain particular kind of risk. Better risk loss of truth than chance of error,-that is your faith-vetoer's exact position. He is actively playing his stake as much as the believer is; he is backing the field against the religious hypothesis, just as the believer is backing the religious hypothesis against the field."

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

"Most people, probably, are in doubt about certain matters ascribed to their past. They may have seen them, may have said them, done them, or they may only have dreamed or imagined they did so."

"Those thoughts are truth which guide us to beneficial interaction with sensible particulars as they occur, whether they copy these in advance or not."

"It may be that no religious reconciliation with the absolute totality of things is possible. Some evils, indeed, are ministerial to higher forms of good; but it may be that there are forms of evil so extreme as to enter into no good system whatsoever."

"To change ones life: Start immediately. Do it flamboyantly."

"A new position of responsibility will usually show a man to be a far stronger creature than was supposed."

"Pessimism leads to weakness, optimism to power."

"We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable."

"Our faith is faith in someone else's faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case."

"Wisdom is learning what to overlook."

"Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune."

"Habit is the enormous flywheel of society its most precious conservative agent. There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision. Full half the time of such a man goes to the deciding or regretting of matters which ought to be so ingrained in him as practically not to exist for his consciousness at all."

"The thinker philosophizes as the lover loves. Even were the consequences not only useless but harmful he must obey his impulse."

"There is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it positively refuses 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."

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

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

"Truth is what works."

"To give up pretensions is as blessed a relief as to get them ratified."

"Science must constantly be reminded that her purposes are not the only purposes and that the order of uniform causation which she has use for and is therefore right in postulating may be enveloped in a wider order on which she has no claim at all."

"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."

"Resign your destiny to higher powers."

"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."

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

"So long as the anti-militarists propose no substitute for war's disciplinary function no moral equivalent of war analogous as one might say to the mechanical equivalent of hate so long they fail to realize the full equities of the situation."

"It is as if there were in the human consciousness a sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception of what we may call 'something there,' more deep and more general than any of the special and particular 'senses' by which the current psychology supposes existent realities to be originally revealed. If this were so, we might suppose the senses to waken our attitudes and conduct as they so habitually do, by first exciting this sense of reality; but anything else, any idea, for example, that might similarly excite it, would have that same prerogative of appearing real which objects of sense normally possess."

"There is an organic affinity between joyousness and tenderness, and their companionship in the saintly life need in no way occasion surprise."

"Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is theoretically possible."