Quotes by William James

"Individuality is founded in feeling and the recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making, and directly perceive how events happen, and how work is actually done."

"We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood."

"Truth is what works."

"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."

"Those thoughts are truth which guide us to beneficial interaction with sensible particulars as they occur, whether they copy these in advance or not."

"Time itself comes in drops."

"The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community."

"Most people never run far enough on their first wind to find out they've got a second."

"Man lives for science as well as bread."

"Pessimism leads to weakness, optimism to power."

"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."

"The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated."

"Begin to be now what you will be hereafter."

"Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does."

"The ideas gained by men before they are twenty-five are practically the only ideas they shall have in their lives."

"A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and life is after all a chain."

"This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it."

"The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes."

"Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact."

"Wisdom is learning what to overlook."