James, William

"The teacher's task is not to implant facts but to guide the flowering of the student's own creative powers."

"The hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world."

"Love will make a man work for the good of the woman he loves more persistently and pugnaciously than any other motive."

"The moral equivalent of war—we must make new energies and hardinesses continue the manliness to which the military mind so faithfully clings."

"It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all."

"The only function of the imagination is to give the mind new powers."

"Character is the product of two things: natural bent and training which cultivates or checks the natural bent."

"The first thing to learn in intercourse with others is non-interference with their own particular ways of being happy."

"A great idea is usually original to more than one discoverer."

"The best argument for free will is the bad argument for determinism."

"Individuality is founded in feeling; and the recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making."

"Every revolutionary idea seems to evoke three stages of reaction: first, 'it's completely impossible'; second, 'it's possible, but it's not worth doing'; third, 'I said it was a good idea all along.'"

"The deepest craving of human nature is the need to be appreciated."

"The habit of excessive introspection is poor intellectual economy."

"Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly."

"In the last analysis, the essential problem is one of life and death, of being and nothingness."

"We grant that happiness is a desideratum, a good. Now what kind of a good must the absolute be?"

"There is very little difference between one man and another; but what little there is, is very important."

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

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

"The deepest principle of human nature is the craving to be appreciated by our fellows."

"Saintliness is a condition of the mind, not a permanent attainment."

"The most characteristically spiritual of experiences are the most private and least transferable."

"To change one's life, start immediately, do it flamboyantly, no exceptions."

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

"Plurality of thought in our decision-making processes is not a bug; it is a feature."

"The true solution to the problem of life is only reached when we pass from thought to reality."

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

"Consciousness, however it came about, is the one unquestionable fact of experience."

"Education, in its deepest significance, means nothing less than the science of relations."