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

"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."

"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."

"To spend life for something which outlasts it."

"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."

"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."

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

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

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

"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."

"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 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."

"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."

"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."

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

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

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

"Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has no use. No faith in anything of that cheap kind!"

"To be a real philosopher all that is necessary is to hate some one else's type of thinking."

"There must be something solemn, serious, and tender about any attitude which we denominate religious. If glad, it must not grin or snicker; if sad, it must not scream or curse."

"Where quality is the thing sought after, the thing of supreme quality is cheap, whatever the price one has to pay for it."

"It is wrong always, everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence."

"Knowledge about life is one thing; effective occupation of a place in life, with its dynamic currents passing through your being, is another."

"The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes."

"The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community."

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

"The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook."

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

"Man can alter his life by altering his thinking."

"Man lives for science as well as bread."

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

"Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different."

"An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible."

"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."

"Success or failure depends more upon attitude than upon capacity successful men act as though they have accomplished or are enjoying something. Soon it becomes a reality. Act, look, feel successful, conduct yourself accordingly, and you will be amazed at the positive results."

"Action seems to follow feeling, but really action 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."