WednesdayApr 08, 2026
Quotes: 53419 Authors: 9969
Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.
The bitch-goddess, Success.
The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
I myself believe that the evidence for God lies primarily in inner personal experiences.
A genius is the man in whom you are least likely to find the power of attending to anything insipid or distasteful in itself. He breaks his engagements, leaves his letters unanswered, neglects his family duties incorrigibly, because he is powerless to turn his attention down and back from those more interesting trains of imagery with which his genius constantly occupies his mind.
Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.
Be willing to have it so. Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.
The voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our spontaneous cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully. and act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there. To feel brave,act as if we were brave, use all our will to that end, and courage will very likely replace fear. If we act as if from some better feeling, the bad feeling soon fold its tent like an Arab and silently steals away.
The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.
It is our attitude at the beginning of a difficult task which, more than anything else, will affect its successful outcome.
We must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can.... The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work.
Belief is desecrated when given to unproved and unquestioned statements for the solace and private pleasure of the believer ... It is wrong always, everywhere, and for every one, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.
Modern man ... has not ceased to be credulous ... the need to believe haunts him.
Our belief at the beginning of a doubtful undertaking is the one thing that insures the successful outcome of our venture.
They conquer who believe they can. He has not learned the first lesson of life who does not every day surmount a fear.
Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.
Much of what we call evil is due entirely to the way men take the phenomenon. It can so often be converted into a bracing and tonic good by a simple change of the sufferer's inner attitude from one of fear to one of fight; its string can so often depart and turn into a relish when, after vainly seeking to shun it, we agree to face about and bear it ...
Democracy is still upon its trial. The civic genius of our people is its only bulwark.
Most of us can learn to live in perfect comfort on higher levels of power. Everyone knows that on any given day there are energies slumbering in him which the incitements of that day do not call forth. Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. It is evident that our organism has stored-up reserves of energy that are ordinarily not called upon deeper and deeper strata of explosible material, ready for use by anyone who probes so deep. The human individual usually lives far within his limits.
Every sort of energy and endurance, of courage and capacity for handling lifes evils, is set free in those who have religious faith.
Faith is one of the forces by which men live, and the total absence of it means collapse.
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.
The inner need of believing that this world of nature is a sign of something more spiritual and eternal than itself is just as strong and authoritative in those who feel it, as the inner need of uniform laws of causation ever can be in a professionally scientific head.... Our faculties of belief were not primarily given us to make orthodoxies and heresies withal, they were given us to live by. And to trust our religious demands means first of all to live in the light of them.... The part of wisdom as well as of courage is to believe what is in the line of your needs, for only by such belief is the need fulfilled. Refuse to believe, and you shall indeed be right, for you shall irretrievably perish. But believe, and again you shall be right, for you shall save yourself.
It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live al all. And often enough our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only true thing that makes the result come true.
Sporadic great men come everywhere. But for a community to get vibrating through and through with intensely active life, many geniuses coming together and in rapid succession are required. This is why great epochs are so rare, why the sudden bloom of a
Compared to what we ought to be, we are half awake.
What excites and interests the looker-on at life, what the romances and the statues celebrate, and the grim civic monuments remind us of, is the everlasting battle of the powers of light with those of darkness; with heroism reduced to its bare chance, yet ever and anon snatching victory from the jaws of death.
A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity.
There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.
There is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it.
Our life is always deeper than we know, is always more divine than it seems, and hence we are able to survive degradations and despairs which otherwise must engulf us.
If this life be not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight.
This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it, from the moral point of view.
The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal.
Our colleges ought to have lit up in us a lasting relish for the better kind of man, a loss of appetite for mediocrities.
The deepest craving in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.
Regarding mutual tolerance: It is negative in one sense, but positive in another. It absolutely forbids us to be forward in pronouncing on the meaninglessness of forms of existence other than our own; and it commands us to tolerate, respect, and indulge those whom we see harmlessly interested and happy in their own ways, however unintelligible these may be to us. Hands off ....
Men habitually use only a small part of the power which they actually possess.
The sovereign cure for worry is prayer.
We hear in these days of scientific enlightenment a great deal of discussion about the efficacy of Prayer. Many reasons are given why we should not pray. Others give reasons why we should pray. Very little is said of the reason we do pray. The reason is simple: We pray because we cannot help praying.
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
I wished by treating Psychology like a natural science, to help her become one.
Real culture lives by sympathies and admirations, not by dislikes and disdains; under all misleading wrappings it pounces unerringly upon the human core.
Religion ... is a mans total reaction upon life.
Religion ... shall mean for us the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude.
A thing is important if anyone think it important.
Whenever two men meet there are really six people present. There is each man as he sees himself, each man was the other sees him, and each man as he really is.
Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process: the process namely of its verifying itself, its veri-fication. Its validity is the process of its valid-ation.
In the deepest heart of all of us there is a corner in which the ultimate mystery of things works sadly.
Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.
To change your life: Start immediately; Do it flamboyantly; No exceptions.
We are all potentially such sick men. The sanest and best of us are of one clay with lunatics and prison-inmates. And whenever we feel this, such a sense of the vanity of our voluntary career comes over us, that all our morality appears as a plaster hiding a sore it can never cure, and all our well-doing as the hollowest substitute for that well-being that our lives ought to be grounded in, but alas! are not so.
Human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind.
The greatest discovery of my generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind.
Believe that life is worth living and your belief will held create the fact.
The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.
The emotions aren't always immediately subject to reason, but they are always immediately subject to action.
Whereever you are it is your own friends who make your world.
The greatest use of life is to spend it on something that will outlast it.
Tell him to live by yes and no yes to everything good, no to everything bad.
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Objective evidence and certitude are doubtless very fine ideals to play with, but where on this moonlit and dream-visited planet are they found?
He who refuses to embrace a unique opportunity loses the prize as surely as if he had failed.
O my Bergson, you are a magician, and your book is a marvel, a real wonder in the history of philosophy ... In finishing it I found ... such a flavor of persistent euphony, as of a rich river that never foamed or ran thin, but steadily and firmly proceeded with its banks full to the brim.
There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied upon to do, and that is to contradict other philosophers.
Pluralism lets things really exist in the each-form or distributively. Monism thinks that the all-form or collective-unit form is the only form that is rational.
If you want a quality, act as if you already had it. Try the 'as if' technique.
Success plus Self-esteem equals Pretensions.
I have often thought that the best way to define a mans character would be to seek out the particular mental or moral attitude in which, when it came upon him, he felt himself most deeply and intensely active and alive. At such moments there is a voice inside which speaks and says: 'This is the real me!'
There are two kinds of taste, the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition.
To change one's life: 1. Start immediately, 2. Do it flamboyantly, 3. No exceptions.
Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.
The best use of life is to spend it for something that outlasts life.
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.
Action and feeling go together and by regulating the action which is under the more direct control of the will, we can regulate the feeling, which is not.
An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force of a revelation.
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