Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.
Truth in our ideas means their power to work.
A new idea is first condemned as ridiculous and then dismissed as trivial, until finally, it becomes what everybody knows.
Our acts of voluntary attending, as brief and fitful as they are, are nevertheless momentous and critical, determining us, as they do, to higher or lower destinies.
Individuality is founded in feeling.
Far from being antecedent principles that animate the process, law, language, truth are but abstract names for its results.
So our self-feeling in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do.
Faith is synonymous with working hypothesis.
We have nothing to do but to receive, resting absolutely upon the merit, power, and love of our Redeemer.
Mankind’s common instinct for reality has always held the world to be essentially a theatre for heroism.
Intelligence is a fixed goal with variable means of achieving it.
The God of many men is little more than their court of appeal against the damnatory judgment passed on their failures by the opinion of the world.
Habit is the great flywheel of society.
The ultimate test of what a truth means is the conduct it dictates or inspires.
Real servants don’t try to use God for their purposes. They let God use them for His purposes.
We are not only gregarious animals, liking to be in sight of our fellows, but we have an innate propensity to get ourselves noticed, and noticed favorably, by our kind.
Need and struggle are what excite and inspire us; our hour of triumph is what brings the void. Not the Jews of the captivity, but those of the days of Solomon ’s glory are those from whom the pessimistic utterances in our Bible come.
Man’s chief difference from the brutes lies in the exuberant excess of his subjective propensities. Prune his extravagance, sober him, and you undo him.
As long as there are postmen, life will have zest.
On pragmatistic principles, if the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word, it is true.