William James

"Our faith is faith in someone else's faith."

"A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices."

"The human individual definitely cherishes the belief that he is free."

"There is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood."

"Wisdom is the art of knowing which impulses to obey."

"The energy of effort is what we feel, the sense of resistance, the awareness of things to be overcome."

"The deepest reason why we throb with life is that we are living in the presence of what is higher than ourselves."

"The greatest revolution of our generation is the discovery that human beings can change their outer lives by changing their inner attitudes of mind."

"We ought to say a feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by, quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue or a feeling of cold."

"Effort is the essential note in all this higher mental life. Will is a fact in the world."

"The best ideas are common property."

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

"There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all."

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

"Individuals of genius succeed without rules; but they also succeed when rules are applied to them."

"A new idea is first condemned as ridiculous, and then dismissed as trivial, until finally it becomes what everybody knows."

"The only use of an obstacle is to refine the powers of resistance."

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

"The moment a man begins to talk about technique that's when we know he's fresh out of ideas."

"Human life is a struggle between past and future—what we remember and what we expect."

"The deeper principle of being is the notion that relations are as real as the things they relate."

"Weed out the will to compete, along with the pressure to produce, and what are you left with? Virtue, perhaps."

"The world resists you less when you're not pushing so hard against it."

"Tendencies toward certain kinds of conduct constitute personality. Personality, therefore, is the expression of one's favorite tendencies and preferences."

"The greatest discovery is that people can alter their character by changing their basic attitudes."

"How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do."

"Millions of items in the universe cannot be thought. But we can think only thoughts that correspond to facts."

"I say we should keep religion and science independent. Let them live in separate compartments."

"The moral equivalent of war must be found if we want to understand the driving forces of human nature."

"A determined effort to do the best you can is its own reward."