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.
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.
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.
We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, never to be undone.
The thinker philosophizes as the lover loves. Even were the consequences not only useless but harmful, he must obey his impulse.
The belief in free-will is not in the least incompatible with the belief in Providence, provided you do not restrict the Providence to fulminating nothing but fatal decrees.
The man whose acquisitions stick is the man who is always achieving and advancing whilst his neighbors, spending most of their time in relearning what they once knew but have forgotten, simply hold their own.
Seek out that particular mental attribute which makes you feel most deeply and vitally alive.
The general law is that no mental modification ever occurs which is not accompanied or followed by a bodily change.
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.
The exercise of prayer, in those who habitually exert it, must be regarded by us doctors as the most adequate and normal of all the pacifiers of the mind and calmers of the nerves.
The instinct of ownership is fundamental in man’s nature.
The most any one can do is to confess as candidly as he can the grounds for the faith that is in him, and leave his example to work on others as it may.
The difference between the first and second-best things in art absolutely seems to escape verbal definition – it is a matter of a hair, a shade, an inward quiver of some kind – yet what miles away in the point of preciousness!
Life feels like a real fight – as if there were something really wild in the universe which we, with all our idealities and faithfulnesses, are needed to redeem.
It is art that makes life, and I know of no substitute whatsoever for the force and beauty of its process.
We are thinking beings, and we cannot exclude the intellect from participating in any of our functions.
Lay plans as if we were to be immortal.
To leap across an abyss, one is better served by faith than doubt.
The university most worthy of rational admiration is that one in which your lonely thinker can feel himself lonely, most positively furthered, and most richly fed.