Focus on increasing service. Becoming great where you are. Pile in the wood. The heat will follow.
Man alone of all the creatures of earth can change his own pattern. Man alone is the architect of his own destiny.
There can be no final truth in ethics any more than in physics, until the last man has had his experience and said his say.
Those thoughts are truth which guide us to beneficial interaction with sensible particulars as they occur, whether they copy these in advance or not.
If the grace of God miraculously operates, it probably operates through the subliminal door.
Man lives for science as well as bread.
Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.
The world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck.
In its broadest term, religion says that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in rightful relations to it.
It is wrong always, everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.
Why should we think upon things that are lovely? Because thinking determines life. It is a common habit to blame life upon the environment. Environment modifies life but does not govern life. The soul is stronger than its surroundings.
All the daily routine of life, our dressing and undressing, the coming and going from our work or carrying through of its various operations, is utterly without mental reference to pleasure and pain, except under rarely realized conditions.
Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly.
There is but one cause of human failure. And that is man’s lack of faith in his true Self.
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.
It would probably astound each of us beyond measure to be let into his neighbors mind and to find how different the scenery was there from that of his own.
Most people, probably, are in doubt about certain matters ascribed to their past. They may have seen them, may have said them, done them, or they may only have dreamed or imagined they did so.
Our colleges ought to have lit up in us a lasting relish for a better kind of man, a loss of appetite for mediocrities.
Religion, whatever it is, is a man’s total reaction upon life.
The first thing to learn in intercourse with others is non-interference with their own particular ways of being happy, provided those ways do not assume to interfere by violence with ours.