William James

"The good, to emphasize it again, must be the same for all of us, since we are all concerned with human nature."

"We are not born with the faculty of thought; we are born with the capacity to be educated."

"Vagueness and ambiguity are the sources of most philosophical confusion."

"The perception of an external world is the same thing as the faculty which is exercised in the discovery of truth."

"Few of us realize how much psychology is concerned with the perception of the human environment."

"To know what not to do is the best knowledge of all."

"The lover is the one who sacrifices himself and asks nothing in return."

"The truth is, in any case, that if there is anything worth calling a human being, it is the capacity to do one's duty."

"If you believe that feeling bad or worrying long enough will change a past or future event, then you are residing on another planet with a different reality system."

"When you have to make a choice and you don't make it, that is in itself a choice you've made."

"The deepest principle of human nature is the desire to be appreciated, to be treated as important and to have one's existence acknowledged."

"The real tragedy of human existence is not that we are alone, but that we cannot bear loneliness."

"We are dying from civilization as much as we are living by it."

"Greatness lives in one of two places: in the moment of decision or in the moment of sacrifice."

"A thought will only be useful if it gets into your head and plants itself deep like a seed."

"The deepest secret is that life is not a process of getting but a process of becoming."

"Character is determined by choices made under pressure."

"Success, in any realm, is determined more by how much you care about what you're doing than by what you're trying to achieve."

"The freedom to fail is essential to the freedom to succeed."

"Our ordinary thinking is concerned with facts and relations, but in dreams we are concerned with meanings and values."

"The greatest remedy for anger is delay."

"Conversion is the process whereby new properties not previously inherent in the material elements combine to form something unprecedented."

"Much of what we call evil is due entirely to the way men take their facts."

"The strenuous life appeals to very few people in our actual world."

"Art is the response to the demand for entertainment, for the stimulation of our senses and imagination."

"Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system."

"The cure for evil and crime is not the punishment of the criminal but his reform."

"We learn wisdom from failure much more than from success."

"The 'thoughts' and 'intellectual operations' of our conscious waking life are not the only kinds of thinking we can do."

"Every mind must evolve its own answer to the question of how to live."