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.
Procrastination is attitude’s natural assassin. There’s nothing so fatiguing as an uncompleted task.
There are two lives, the natural and the spiritual, and we must lose the one before we can participate in the other.
The prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers.
It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all.
I am no lover of disorder and doubt as such. Rather I fear to lose truth by the pretension to possess it already wholly.
Science, like life, feeds on its own decay. New facts burst old rules; then newly divined conceptions bind old and new together into a reconciling law.
The god whom science recognizes must be a God of universal laws exclusively, a God who does a wholesale, not a retail business. He cannot accommodate his processes to the convenience of individuals.
The best argument I know for an immortal life is the existence of a man who deserves one.
If things are ever to move upward, some one must take the first step, and assume the risk of it. No one who is not willing to try charity, to try non-resistance as the saint is always willing, can tell whether these methods will or will not succeed.
It makes a tremendous emotional and practical difference to one whether one accepts the universe in the drab discolored way of stoic resignation to necessity, or with the passionate happiness of Christian saints.
Religions have approved themselves; they have ministered to sundry vital needs which they found reigning. When they violated other needs too strongly, or when other faiths came which served the same needs better, the first religions were supplanted.
The states of consciousness are all that psychology needs to do her work with. Metaphysics or theology may prove the Soul to exist; but for psychology the hypothesis of such a substantial principle of unity is superfluous.
Invention, using the term most broadly, and imitation, are the two legs, so to call them, on which the human race historically has walked.
The lunatic’s visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact.