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

"The question of being is the darkest in all philosophy."

"Belief and doubt are living attitudes, and involve conduct on our part. Our only way, for example, of doubting, or refusing to believe, that a certain thing is, is continuing to act as if it were not."

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

"In order to disprove the assertion that all crows are black, one white crow is sufficient."

"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."

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

"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."

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

"Fear of life in one form or another is the great thing to exorcise."

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

"Why may we not be in the universe, as our dogs and cats are in our drawingrooms and libraries?"

"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."

"Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed."

"I hope that here in America more and more the ideal of the well-trained and vigorous body will be maintained neck by neck with that of the well-trained and vigorous mind as the two coequal halves of the higher education for men and women alike."

"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."

"The emotions are not always subject to reason ... but they are always subject to action. When thoughts do not neutralize an undesirable emotion action will."

"Every time a resolve or fine glow of feeling evaporates without bearing fruit it is worse than a chance lost it works to hinder future emotions from taking the normal path of discharge."

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

"Faith is one of the forces by which men live the total absence of it means collapse."

"We know the meaning so long as no one asks us to define it."

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

"Our intelligence cannot wall itself up alive, like a pupa in a chrysalis. It must at any cost keep on speaking terms with the universe that engendered it."

"Seek out that particular mental attitude 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."

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

"Through prayer, religion insists, things which cannot be realized in any other manner come about: energy which but for prayer would be bound is by prayer set free and operates in some part, be it objective or subjective, of the world of facts."

"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."

"I, therefore, for one, cannot see my way to accepting the agnostic rules for truth-seeking, or wilfully agree to keep my willing nature out of the game. I cannot do so for this plain reason, that a rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those kinds of truth were really there, would be an irrational rule."

"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?"

"As Charles Lamb says there is nothing so nice as doing good by stealth and being found out by accident so I now say it is even nicer to make heroic decisions and to be prevented by 'circumstances beyond your control' from ever trying to execute them."

"Lives based on having are less free than lives based either on doing or on being."

"Man lives for science as well as bread."

"With mere good intentions hell is proverbially paved."

"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."

"Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than 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. So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and when his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast."

"No fact in human nature is more characteristic than its willingness to live on a chance. The existence of the chance makes the difference between a life of which the keynote is resignation and a life of which the keynote is hope."

"Genius in truth means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way."

"Need and struggle are what excite and inspire us our hour of triumph is what brings the void."

"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."

"What every genuine philosopher (every genuine man, in fact) craves most is praise although the philosophers generally call it recognition!"

"These then are my last words to you. Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact."