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.
Selection is the very keel on which our mental ship is built. And in this case of memory its utility is obvious. If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing.
The lunatic’s visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.
If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, you mustn’t seek to show that no crows are; it is enough if you prove one single crow to be white.
Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation.
To improve the golden moment of opportunity, and catch the good that is within our reach, is the great art of life.
How can the moribund old man reason back to himself the romance, the mystery, the imminence of great things with which our old earth tingled for him in the days when he was young and well?