Wherever you are it is your own friends who make your world.

The transition from tenseness, self-responsibility, and worry, to equanimity, receptivity, and peace, is the most wonderful of all those shiftings of inner equilibrium, those changes of personal centre of energy, which I have analyzed so often; and the chief wonder of it is that it so often comes about, not by doing, but by simply relaxing and throwing the burden down.

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

The gods we stand by are the gods we need and can use, the gods whose demands on us are reinforcements of our demands on ourselves and on one another.

Time itself comes in drops.

Religion...is a man's total reaction upon life.

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.

Fatalism, whose solving word in all crises of behavior is "All striving is vain," will never reign supreme, for the impulse to take life strivingly is indestructible in the race. Moral creeds which speak to that impulse will be widely successful in spite of inconsistency, vagueness, and shadowy determination of expectancy. Man needs a rule for his will, and will invent one if one be not given him.

The impulse to take life strivingly is indestructible in the race.

There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.

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.

Properly speaking, a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognise him.

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

Creatures extremely low in the intellectual scale may have conception. All that is required is that they should recognize the same experience again.

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 fashioning our characters in the wrong way.

The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.

In youth we may have an absolutely new experience, subjective or objective, every hour of the day. Apprehension is vivid, retentiveness strong, and our recollections of that time, like those in a time spent in rapid and interesting travel, are of something intricate, multitudinous, and long-drawn-out. But as each passing year converts some of this experience into automatic routine which we hardly note at all, the days and the weeks smooth themselves out in recollection to a contentless unit, and the years grow hollow and collapse.

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

The whole drift of my education goes to persuade me that the world of our present consciousness is only one out of many worlds of consciousness that exist.

There is but one indefectibly certain truth, and that is the truth that pyrrhonistic scepticism itself leaves standing, the truth that the present phenomenon of consciousness exists.

The total possible consciousness may be split into parts which co-exist but mutually ignore each other.

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

How pleasant is the day when we give up striving to be young or slender.

To be "conscious" means not simply to be, but to be reported, known, to have awareness of one's being added to that being.

Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than that you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test. So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and when his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast.

We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable.

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

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

The greatest use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.

The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.