Quotes from William James

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

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

Man can alter his life by altering his thinking.

To change ones life: Start immediately. Do it flamboyantly.

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

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

The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.

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

One hearty laugh together will bring enemies into a closer communion of heart than hours spent on both sides in inward wrestling with the mental demon of uncharitable feeling.

Most men's friendships are too inarticulate.

The deepest hunger in human beings is the desire to be appreciated.

The first thing to learn in intercourse with others is non-interference with their own peculiar ways of being happy provided those ways do not assume to interfere with ours.

Success plus Self-esteem equals Pretensions.

All natural goods perish. Riches take wings; fame is a breath; love is a cheat; youth and health and pleasure vanish.

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.

Old age has the last word: the purely naturalistic look at life, however enthusiastically it may begin, is sure to end in sadness. . . . This sadness lies at the heart of every merely positivist, agnostic, or naturalistic scheme of philosophy.

There is a voice inside which speaks and says: ''This is the real me!''

Human beings are born into this little span of life of which the best thing is its friendship and intimacies, and soon their places will know them no more, and yet they leave their friendships and intimacies with no cultivation, to grow as they will by the roadside, expecting them to keep by force of inertia.