"Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state."

"Let everything you do be done as if it makes a difference."

"Human beings are born into this little span of life of which the best thing is its friendships and intimacies and yet they leave their friendships and intimacies with no cultivation, to grow as they will by the roadside, expecting them to "keep" by force of mere inertia."

"Four Characters in Consciousness-How does it go on? We notice immediately four important characters in the process, of which it shall be the duty of the present chapter to treat in a general way:1) Every 'state' tends to be part of a personal consciousness. 2) Within each personal consciousness states are always changing. 3) Each personal consciousness is sensibly continuous.4) It is interested in some parts of its object to the exclusion of others, and welcomes or rejects-chooses from among them, in a word-all the while."

"An outree explanation, violating all our preconceptions, would never pass for a true account of a novelty. We should scratch round industriously till we found something less excentric."

"Beyond the very extremity of fatigue distress, amounts of ease and power that we never dreamed ourselves to own, sources of strength habitually not taxed at all, because habitually we never push through the obstruction."

"If the grace of God miraculously operates, it probably operates through the subliminal door."

"We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause."

"Time itself comes in drops."

"We are like islands in the sea, separate on the surface but connected in the deep."

"The first thing to learn in intercourse with others is non-interference with their own peculiar ways of being happy provided those ways do not assume to interfere with ours."

"In business for yourself, not by yourself."

"Every man who possibly can should force himself to a holiday of a full month in a year, whether he feels like taking it or not."

"Life is one long struggle between conclusions based on abstract ways of conceiving cases and opposite conclusions prompted by our instinctive perception of them."

"To study the abnormal is the best way of understanding the normal."

"Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation."

"My experience is what I agree to attend to."

"The world we see that seems so insane is the result of a belief system that is not working. 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."

"Begin to be now what you will be hereafter."

"To be conscious means not simply to be, but to be reported, known, to have awareness of one's being added to that being."

"Everyone is familiar with the phenomenon of feeling more or less alive on different days. Everyone knows on any given day that there are energies slumbering in him which the incitements of that day do not call forth, but which he might display if these were greater. Most of us feel as if a sort of cloud weighed upon us, keeping us below our highest notch of clearness in discernment, sureness in reasoning, or firmness in deciding. Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. Our fires are damped, our drafts are checked. We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources. Stating the thing broadly, the human individual thus lives far within his limits; he possesses powers of various sorts which he habitually fails to use."

"Not that I would not, if I could, be both handsome ...and well-dressed, and a great athlete, and make a million a year, be a wit, a bon-vivant, and a lady-killer, as well as a philosopher; a philanthropist, statesman, warrior, and African explorer, as well as a 'tone poet' and saint. But the thing is simply impossible. Such different characters may conceivably at the outset of life be alike possible to a man. But to make any one of them actual, the rest must more or less be suppressed. So the seeker of his truest, strongest, deepest self must review the list carefully, and pick out the one on which to stake his salvation. All other selves thereupon become unreal."

"To change one's life: 1. Start immediately. 2. Do it flamboyantly. 3. No exceptions."

"Psychology is the science of mental life."

"It is our attitude at the beginning of a difficult task which, more than anything else, will affect its successful outcome."

"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."

"So you see that the process of education, taken in a large way, may be described as nothing but the process of acquiring ideas or conceptions, the best educated mind being the mind which has the largest stock of them, ready to meet the largest possible variety of the emergencies of life. The lack of education means only the failure to have acquired them, and the consequent liability to be 'floored' and 'rattled' in the vicissitudes of experience."

"A man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him."

"The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments."

"Action may not bring happiness but there is no happiness without action."

"Footnotes the little dogs yapping at the heels of the text."

"Is life worth living? It all depends on the liver."