Quotes from William James

The desire to gain wealth and the fear to lose it are our chief breeders of cowardice and propagators of corruption.

Our acts of voluntary attending, as brief and fitful as they are, are nevertheless momentous and critical, determining us, as they do, to higher or lower destinies.

Resign your destiny to higher powers.

Give your dreams all you've got, and you'll be amazed at the energy that comes out of you.

The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.

The aim of a college education is to teach you to know a good man when you see one.

The whole drift of my education goes to persuade me that the world of our present consciousness is only one out of many worlds of consciousness that exist.

The education of attention would be an education par excellence

The emotions aren't always immediately subject to reason, but they are always immediately subject to action.

Seize the very first possible opportunity 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.

An enormous mass of experience, both of homeopathic doctors and their patients, is invoked in favor of the efficacy of these remedies and doses.

The one who thinks over his experiences most, and weaves them into systematic relations with each other, will be the one with the best memory.

The simplest rudiment of mystical experience would seem to be that deepened sense of the significance of a maxim or formula which occasionally sweeps over one.

Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. Our fires are damped, our drafts are checked. We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources.

Belief creates the actual fact.

There is but one cause of human failure. And that is man's lack of faith in his true Self.

Our faith is faith in someone else's faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case.

To leap across an abyss, one is better served by faith than doubt.

Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is still theoretically possible ... faith is the readiness to act in a cause the prosperous issue of which is not certified to us in advance.

Faith is one of the forces by which men live, and the total absence of it means collapse

Faith is one of the forces by which men live the total absence of it means collapse.

The prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers.

These then are my last words to you. Be not afraid of life. Believe life is worth living and your belief will help you create the fact.

The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.