“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.” 

“I don't sing because I'm happy. I'm happy because I sing.” 

“A man with no philosophy in him is the most inauspicious and unprofitable of all possible social mates.” 

“Pragmatism asks its usual question. "Grant an idea or belief to be true," it says, "what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone's actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth's cash-value in experiential terms?” 

“As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use.” 

“[There are, in us] possibilities that take our breath away, and show a world wider than either physics or philistine ethics can imagine. Here is a world in which all is well, in spite of certain forms of death, death of hope, death of strength, death of responsibility, of fear and wrong, death of everything that paganism, naturalism and legalism pin their trust on.” 

“Each of us literally chooses, by his way of attending to things, what sort of universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit.” 

“Your hopes, dreams and aspirations are legitimate. They are trying to take you airborne, above the clouds, above the storms, if you only let them.” 

“Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life. Each lapse is like the letting fall of a ball of string which one is carefully winding up; a single slip undoes more than a great many turns will wind again.” 

“Damn the Absolute!” 

“The perfect stillness of the night was thrilled by a more solemn silence. The darkness held a presence that was all the more felt because it was not seen. I could not any more have doubted that HE was there than that I was. Indeed, I felt myself to be, if possible, the less real of the two.” 

“It does not follow, because our ancestors made so many errors of fact and mixed them with their religion, that we should therefore leave off being religious at all. By being religious we establish ourselves in possession of ultimate reality at the only points at which reality is given us to guard. Our responsible concern is with our private destiny, after all.” 

“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.” 

“The prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers. ” 

“Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not.” 

“The attempt at introspective analysis... is in fact like seizing a spinning top to catch its motion, or trying to turn up the gas quickly enough to see the darkness.” 

“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.” 

“Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation.” 

“All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits.” 

“The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual; the impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.” 

“There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied upon to do, and that is to contradict other philosophers.” 

“None of us are ever who we were yesterday.” 

“We need only in cold blood ACT as if the thing in question were real, and keep acting as if it were real, and it will infallibly end by growing into such a connection with our life that it will become real.” 

“But it is the bane of psychology to suppose that where results are similar, processes must be the same. Psychologists are too apt to reason as geometers would, if the latter were to say that the diameter of a circle is the same thing as its semi-circumference, because, forsooth, they terminate in the same two points.” 

“Invention, using the term most broadly, and imitation, are the two legs, so to call them, on which the human race historically has walked.” 

“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” 

“The greatest revolution of our generation is the discovery that human beings by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives” 

“All religions and spiritual traditions begin with the cry "Help!” 

“Wisdom is seeing something in a non-habitual manner.” 

“We know the meaning so long as no one asks us to define it.” 

“To suggest personal will and effort to one all sicklied o'er with the sense of irremediable impotence is to suggest the most impossible of things. What he craves is to be consoled in his very powerlessness, to feel that the spirit of the universe recognizes and secures him, all decaying and failing as he is.” 

“The first thing the intellect does with an object is to class it along with something else. But any object that is infinitely important to us and awakens our devotion feels to us also as if it must be sui generis and unique. Probably a crab would be filled with a sense of personal outrage if it could hear us class it without ado or apology as a crustacean, and thus dispose of it. "I am no such thing," it would say; "I am MYSELF, MYSELF alone.” 

“Everyone knows what attention is. It is taking possession of the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seems several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration of consciousness are of its essence. It implies a withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others.” 

“There's nothing so absurd that if you repeat it often enough, people will believe it.” 

“I know that you, ladies and gentlemen, have a philosophy, each and all of you, and that the most interesting and important thing about you is the way in which it determines the perspective in your several worlds.” 

“My thinking is first and last and always for the sake of my doing.” 

“Psychology is the science of mental life” 

“Our colleges ought to have lit up in us a lasting relish for a better kind of man, a loss of appetite for mediocrities.” 

“Our intelligence cannot wall itself up alive, like a pupa in a chrysalis. It must at any cost keep on speaking terms with the universe that engendered it.” 

“The means have murdered the end.” 

“Whatever is beyond this narrow rational consciousness we mistake for our only consciousness.” 

“A man's Self is the sum total of all that he can call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house.” 

“Most people live in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness, and of their soul's resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole organism should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger.” 

“In order to disprove the assertion that all crows are black, one white crow is sufficient.” 

“I will act as if what i do makes a difference.” 

“Our science is a drop, our ignorance a sea.” 

“What right have we to believe Nature under any obligation to do her work by means of complete minds only? She may find an incomplete mind a more suitable instrument for a particular purpose.” 

“As a rule reading fiction is as hard to me as trying to hit a target by hurling feathers at it. I need resistance to celebrate!” 

“To know is one thing, and to know for certain that we know is another. One” 

“Let any one try, I will not say to arrest, but to notice or attend to, the present moment of time. One of the most baffling experiences occurs. Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming.”