“The means have murdered the end.” 

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

“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.” 

“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.” 

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

“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” 

“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” 

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

“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.” 

“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.” 

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

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

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

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

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

“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 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.” 

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

“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.” 

“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.” 

“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.” 

“Damn the Absolute!” 

“When you have to make a choice and don't make it, that is in itself a choice.”