There is but one unconditional commandment, which is that we should seek incessantly, with fear and trembling, so to vote and to act as to bring about the very largest total universe of good which we can see.

If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing. It would take us as long to recall a space of time as it took the original time to elapse, and we should never get ahead with our thinking.

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

We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise anyone who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. If he does not join the general scramble and pant with the money-making street, we deem him spiritless and lacking in ambition.

Beauty and hideousness, love and cruelty, life and death keep house together in indissoluble partnership; and there gradually steals over us, instead of the old warm notion of a man-loving Deity, that of an awful power that neither hates nor loves, but rolls all things together meaninglessly to a common doom. This is an uncanny, a sinister, a nightmare view of life, and its peculiar poisonousness, lies expressly in our holding two things together which cannot possibly agree.

Man needs a rule for his will, and will invent one if one be not given him.

I myself believe that the evidence for God lies primarily in inner personal experiences.

An unlearned carpenter of my acquaintance once said in my hearing: "There is very little difference between one man and another; but what little there is, is very important." This distinction seems to me to go to the root of the matter.

A thing is important if anyone think it important.

Real culture lives by sympathies and admirations, not by dislikes and disdain - under all misleading wrappings it pounces unerringly upon the human core.

There is nothing to make one indignant in the mere fact that life is hard, that men should toil and suffer pain. The planetary conditions once for all are such, and we can stand it.

All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary.

"Facts" are the bounds of human knowledge, set for it, not by it.

The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal.

Time itself comes in drops.

The only function that one experience can perform is to lead into another experience; and the only fulfillment we can speak of is the reaching of a certain experienced end. When one experience leads to or can lead to the same end as another, they agree in function.

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

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.

The divine shall mean for us only such a primal reality as the individual feels impelled to respond to solemnly and gravely, and neither by a curse nor a jest.

Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly.

Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being.

Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.

Man can alter his life by altering his thinking.

The function of ignoring, of inattention, is as vital a factor in mental progress as the function of attention itself.

Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events.

The world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck.

Tell him to live by yes and no.
Yes to everything good,
No to everything bad.

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

The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as a sculptor works on his block of stone. In a sense the statue stood there from eternity. But there were a thousand different ones beside it, and the sculptor alone is to thank for having extricated this one from the rest.

I cannot understand the willingness to act, no matter how we feel, without the belief that acts are really good and bad.