"To study the abnormal is the best way of understanding the normal"
"The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook"
"If you care enough for a result, you will most certainly attain it"
"Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things. In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf"
"'Pure experience' is the name I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories"
"It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all. And often enough our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true"
"Truth is what works"
"There is an organic affinity between joyousness and tenderness, and their companionship in the saintly life need in no way occasion surprise"
"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 faith is faith in someone else's faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case"
"In the dim background of mind we know what we ought to be doing but somehow we cannot start"
"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 aim of a college education is to teach you to know a good man when you see one"
"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"
"It is our attitude at the beginning of a difficult task which, more than anything else, will affect its successful outcome"
"We never fully grasp the import of any true statement until we have a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement would be"
"It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again"
"Wisdom is learning what to overlook"
"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"
"Where quality is the thing sought after, the thing of supreme quality is cheap, whatever the price one has to pay for it"
"Whenever you're in conflict with someone, there is one factor that can make the difference between damaging your relationship and deepening it. That factor is attitude"
"When you have to make a choice and don't make it, that is in itself a choice"
"Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has no use. No faith in anything of that cheap kind!"
"To change ones life: Start immediately. Do it flamboyantly"
"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"
"To be conscious means not simply to be, but to be reported, known, to have awareness of one's being added to that being"
"To be a real philosopher all that is necessary is to hate some one else's type of thinking"
"Time itself comes in drops"
"Those thoughts are truth which guide us to beneficial interaction with sensible particulars as they occur, whether they copy these in advance or not"
"This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it"
"These then are my last words to you. Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact"
"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"
"There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied upon to do, and that is to contradict other philosophers"
"The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another"
"The greatest use of a life is to spend it on something that will outlast it"
"The greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths"
