James, William

"Truth is what works."

"We are not only our brother's keepers; in a sense which we do not always appreciate, we are our brother's makers."

"The saddest thing that can happen to a man is to awake from life's dream and find no onward path upon which to proceed."

"The greatest thing a human soul ever does is to see something, and tell what it saw in plain speech."

"Seize the very first possible moment to act on every resolution you make, and on every emotional prompting you may experience in the direction of the habits you aspire to gain."

"Patience means restraining your constant desire to act."

"The art of teaching is the art of assisting discovery."

"Dreams and beasts are the interpretors of our nature."

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

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

"All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary."

"The only thing that's evil is when you feel contempt for yourself."

"Mankind's common instinct for reality has always held the world to be essentially a place of things more than ideas."

"The deepest human difference which they establish is in terms of the energy of will."

"And I am sure that as long as men can breathe or see, all hell breaks loose."

"Philosophy, beginning in wonder, as Plato and Aristotle said, is able to fancy every object in an unusual and infinite number of relations to which we are accustomed to seeing it."

"The most immense code of laws and maxims we have ever known is the Bible."

"No difference, no reason for the difference."

"Character is formed in the stream of the world's events."

"The most ethical thing is often the hardest to do."

"Consciousness is a name for a multitude of successive wave crest moments."

"In its broadest and most human sense, religion is mankind's ultimate concern."

"Success or failure in business is caused more by mental attitude even than by mental capacities."

"Wisdom is learning what to overlook."

"The greatest achievement of the human mind is that it has revealed itself as incompetent."

"Faith is a state of openness or trust."

"The solid meaning of life is always the same eternal thing, the marriage, namely, of some unhabitual ideal, however special, with some fidelity, courage, endurance; with some woman's or man's palpitating concrete whole being."

"A great man is made great by the abundance of his natural gifts and the force of his individual will."

"Give up the lie of the idea that you must earn the admiration of the world and you will be relieved of an immense burden."

"The best of life is but intoxication."