William James
The greatest revolution of our generation is the discovery that human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.Collection: Life
Thoughts become perception, perception becomes reality. Alter your thoughts, alter your reality.Collection: Reality
Our view of the world is truly shaped by what we decide to hear.Collection: Views
There is a law in psychology that if you form a picture in your mind of what you would like to be, and you keep and hold that picture there long enough, you will soon become exactly as you have been thinking.Collection: Military
A winner's attitude: it may be difficult, but it's possible. A loser's attitude: It may be possible, but it's too difficult.Collection: Attitude
If you can change your mind, you can change your life.Collection: Love
The mind is made up by what it feeds upon.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Life
There is nothing so absurd that it cannot be believed as truth if repeated often enough.Collection: Science
Formula to live your dream: 1. Be bold. 2. Begin now, 3. No exceptions.Collection: Dream
Once a decision is reached, stop worrying and start working.Collection: Worry
The power to move the world is in the subconcious mindCollection: Moving
Positive images of the future are a powerful and magnetic force... They draw us on and energize us, give us courage and will to take on important initiatives. Negative images of the future also have a magnetism. They pull the spirit downward in the path of despair.Collection: Powerful
Your hopes, dreams and aspirations are legitimate. They are trying to take you airborne, above the clouds, above the storms, if you only let them.Collection: Dream
All of our life is but a mass of small habits - practical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual - that bear us irresistibly toward our destiny.Collection: Spiritual
Whenever two people meet, there are really six people present. There is each man as he sees himself, each man as the other person sees him, and each man as he really is.Collection: Teamwork
Every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.Collection: Lonely
a man does not cry because he is sad, he is sad because he criesCollection: Men
Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance.Collection: Uprising
The total possible consciousness may be split into parts which co-exist but mutually ignore each other.Collection: Splits
We must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, and as carefully guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous.Collection: Educational
We divert our attention from disease and death as much as we can; the slaughterhouses are huddled out of sight and never mentioned, so that the world we recognize officially in literature and in society is a poetic fiction far handsomer, cleaner and better than the world that really is.Collection: Sight
Whilst part of what we perceive comes through our senses from the object before us, another part (and it may be the larger part) always comes out of our own mind.Collection: Mind
There is but one indefectibly certain truth , and that is the truth that pyrrhonistic scepticism itself leaves standing, the truth that the present phenomenon of consciousness exists.Collection: Consciousness
Any object not interesting in itself may become interesting through becoming associated with an object in which an interest already exists. The two associated objects grow, as it were, together; the interesting portion sheds its quality over the whole; and thus things not interesting in their own right borrow an interest which becomes as real and as strong as that of any natively interesting thing.Collection: Strong
Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation. There is in the living act of perception always something that glimmers and twinkles and will not be caught, and for which reflection comes too late.Collection: Philosophy
Habit is the great flywheel of society.Collection: Habit
Hogamus, higamous Man is polygamous Higamus, hogamous Woman monogamous.Collection: Men
Out of time we cut 'days' and 'nights', 'summers' and 'winters.' We say what, each part of the sensible continuum is, and all these abstract whats are concepts. The intelletual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of a conceptual order for the persceptual order in which his experience originally comes.Collection: Summer
This overcoming of all the usual barriers between the individual and the Absolute is the great mystic achievement. In mystic states we both become one with the Absolute and we become aware of our oneness. This is the everlasting and triumphant mystical tradition, hardly altered by differences of clime or creed.Collection: Oneness
There must always be a discrepncy between concepts and reality, because the former are static and discontinuous while the latter is dynamic and flowingCollection: Reality
In its broadest term, religion says that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in rightful relations to it.Collection: Lying
First... a new theory is attacked as absurd; then it is admitted to be true, but obvious and insignificant; finally it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim that they themselves discovered it.Collection: Science
Everyone knows that on any given day there are energies slumbering in him which the incitement's of that day do not call forth. Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. The human individual usually lives far within his limits.Collection: Energy
The philosophy which is so important in each of us is not a technical matter; it is our more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means. It is only partly got from books; it is our individual way of just seeing and feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos.Collection: Philosophy
Intelligence is a fixed goal with variable means of achieving it.Collection: Mean
Choose a self and stand by it.Collection: Self
Impulse without reason is enough, and reason without impulse is a poor makeshift.Collection: Reason
Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life. Each lapse is like the letting fall of a ball of string which one is carefully winding up; a single slip undoes more than a great many turns will wind again.Collection: Fall
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.Collection: Philosophy
[T]here is very little difference between one person and another, but what little difference ther eis, is very important.Collection: Differences
Ingenuity in meeting and pursuing the pupil, that tact for the concrete situation, though they are the alpha and omega of the teacher's art, are things to which psychology cannot help us in the least.Collection: Teacher
Cramming seeks to stamp things in by intense application immediately before the ordeal. But a thing thus learned can form but few associations.Collection: Teaching
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.Collection: Happiness
Religion must be considered vindicated in a certain way from the attacks of her critics.Collection: Way
...as I apprehend the Buddhist doctrine of karma, I agree in principle with that.Collection: Karma
Modern transcendental idealism, Emersonianism, for instance, also seems to let God evaporate into abstract Ideality. Not a deity in concreto, not a superhuman person, but the immanent divinity in things, the essentially spiritual structure of the universe, is the object of the transcendentalist cult. In that address of the graduating class at Divinity College in 1838 which made Emerson famous, the frank expression of this worship of mere abstract laws was what made the scandal of the performance.Collection: Letting Go
Our colleges ought to have lit up in us a lasting relish for a better kind of man, a loss of appetite for mediocrities.Collection: Loss
The subjectivist in morals, when his moral feelings are at war with the facts about him, is always free to seek harmony by toningdown the sensitiveness of the feelings.Collection: War