Quotes from William James

Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.

If you can change your mind, you can change your life.

The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.

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

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

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.

I am done with great things and big things, great institutions and big success, and I am for those tiny, invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, yet which if you give them time, will rend the hardest monuments of man's pride.

To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our minds

Anything you may hold firmly in your imagination can be yours.

Good-humor is a philosophic state of mind; it seems to say to Nature that we take her no more seriously than she takes us. I maintain that one should always talk of philosophy with a smile.

Our view of the world is truly shaped by what we decide to hear.

Begin to be now what you will be hereafter.

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.

Wherever you are, it is your friends who make your world.

We may be in the Universe as dogs and cats are in our libraries, seeing the books and hearing the conversation, but having no inkling of the meaning of it all.

There are no differences but differences of degree between different degrees of difference and no difference.

Human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.

Procrastination is attitude's natural assassin. There's nothing so fatiguing as an uncompleted task

My experience is what I agree to attend to.

Beyond the very extremity of fatigue distress, amounts of ease and power that we never dreamed ourselves to own, sources of strength habitually not taxed at all, because habitually we never push through the obstruction

Real servants don't try to use God for their purposes. They let God use them for His purposes.

Smitten as we are with the vision of social righteousness, a God indifferent to everything but adulation, and full of partiality for his individual favorites, lacks an essential element of largeness.

If the grace of God miraculously operates, it probably operates through the subliminal door.

The word 'cause' is an altar to an unknown god.