These then are my last words to you. Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living and your belief… — William James Copy Share Image
Science, like life, feeds on its own decay. New facts burst old rules; then newly divined conceptions bind old and new together… — William James Copy Share Image
It is only in the lonely emergencies of life that our creed is tested: then routine maxims fail, and we fall back… — William James Copy Share Image
There is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account… — William James Copy Share Image
For I had often said that the best argument I knew for an immortal life was the existence of a man who… — William James Copy Share Image
There is no being capable of a spiritual life who does not have within him a jungle. Where the wolf constantly HOWLS… — William James Copy Share Image
There is an organic affinity between joyousness and tenderness, and their companionship in the saintly life need in no way occasion surprise. — William James Copy Share Image
Lives based on having are less free than lives based either on doing or being. — William James Copy Share Image
Why should we think upon things that are lovely? Because thinking determines life. It is a common habit to blame life upon… — William James Copy Share Image
The truth remains that, after adolescence has begun, "words, words, words," must constitute a large part, and an always larger part as… — William James Copy Share Image
“Human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.” — William James Copy Share Image
Man, whatever else he may be, is primarily a practical being, whose mind is given him to aid in adapting him to… — William James Copy Share Image
Most of us can learn to live in perfect comfort on higher levels of power. Everyone knows that on any given day… — William James Copy Share Image
The intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience… — William James Copy Share Image
If this life is not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no… — William James Copy Share Image
“This sadness lies at the heart of every merely positivistic, agnostic, or naturalistic scheme of philosophy. Let sanguine healthy-mindedness do its best… — William James Copy Share Image
'Pure experience' is the name I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with… — William James Copy Share Image
Fatalism, whose solving word in all crises of behavior is All striving is vain, will never reign supreme, for the impulse to… — William James Copy Share Image
If you want to change your life, do it flamboyantly and start immediately. — William James Copy Share Image
Effort is the one strictly undervalued and original contribution we make to this world. — William James Copy Share Image
We are all potentially such sick men. The sanest and best of us are of one clay with lunatics and prison-inmates. And whenever we… — William James Copy Share Image
In the dim background of our mind we know meanwhile what we ought to be doing: getting up, dressing ourselves, answering the person who… — William James Copy Share Image
“Our minds thus grow in spots; and like grease-spots, the spots spread. But we let them spread as little as possible: we keep unaltered… — William James Copy Share Image
Woe to him whose beliefs play fast and loose with the order which realities follow in his experience; they will lead him nowhere or… — William James Copy Share Image
We never fully grasp the import of any true statement until we have a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement would be. — William James Copy Share Image
Human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind. — William James Copy Share Image
Most people, probably, are in doubt about certain matters ascribed to their past. They may have seen them, may have said them, done them,… — William James Copy Share Image
“How soon, indeed, are human things forgotten! As we meet here this morning, the Southern sun is shining on their place of burial, and… — William James Copy Share Image
