The discovery of the power of our thoughts will prove to be the most important discovery of our time.
The one who thinks over his experiences most, and weaves them into systematic relations with each other, will be the one with the best memory.
Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. Our fires are damped, our drafts are checked. We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources.
Need and struggle are what excite and inspire us; our hour of triumph is what brings the void.
There must be something solemn, serious, and tender about any attitude which we denominate religious. If glad, it must not grin or snicker; if sad, it must not scream or curse.
Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs pass, so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them.
The hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioned our characters in the wrong way.
Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.
The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour.
Where quality is the thing sought after, the thing of supreme quality is cheap, whatever the price one has to pay for it.
To be a real philosopher all that is necessary is to hate some one else’s type of thinking.
Time itself comes in drops.
The ideas gained by men before they are twenty-five are practically the only ideas they shall have in their lives.
The ‘I think’ which Kant said must be able to accompany all my objects, is the ‘I breathe’ which actually does accompany them.
Our esteem for facts has not neutralized in us all religiousness. It is itself almost religious. Our scientific temper is devout.
To be conscious means not simply to be, but to be reported, known, to have awareness of one’s being added to that being.
The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.
How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure.
A man with no philosophy in him is the most inauspicious and unprofitable of all possible social mates.
To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced.