William James Quotes

This life is worth living we can say since it is what we make it.

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

The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes of mind.
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William James (1842 - 1910)

“To be converted, to be regenerated, to receive grace, to experience religion, to gain assurance, are so many phrases which denote the process, gradual or sudden, by which a self hitherto divided, and consciously wrong, inferior, unhappy, becomes unified and consciously right, superior, and happy, in consequence of its firmer hold upon religious realities."

The greatest discovery of my generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind.

To miss the joy is to miss it all

Divinity lies all around us, but society remains too hidebound to accept that fact…The mother sea and the fountain-head of all religions lies in the mystical experiences of the individual.

Whenever you're in conflict with someone, there is one factor that can make the difference between damaging your relationship and deepening it. That factor is attitude.

Nothing [is] so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.

Each of us literally chooses, by his way of attending to things, what sort of universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit.

"Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. The human being lives far within his limits."

How pleasant is the day when we give up striving to be young—or slender.

Beyond the very extreme of fatigue and distress, we may find amounts of ease and power we never dreamed ourselves to own; sources of strength never taxed at all because we never push through the obstruction.

Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.

Every man who possibly can should force himself to a holiday of a full month in a year, whether he feels like taking it or not.

All religion begins with the cry "Help!"

We do not sing because we are happy, we are happy because we sing.

Things are not as they are but as we are.

It is your friends who make your world.

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