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William James Quotes


Genius... means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.

Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.

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.

Human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind.

I don't sing because I'm happy; I'm happy because I sing.

I will act as if what I do makes a difference.

If any organism fails to fulfill its potentialities, it becomes sick.

If merely 'feeling good' could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.

If the grace of God miraculously operates, it probably operates through the subliminal door.

If you believe that feeling bad or worrying long enough will change a past or future event, then you are residing on another planet with a different reality system.

If you care enough for a result, you will most certainly attain it.

If you want a quality, act as if you already had it.

In business for yourself, not by yourself.

In the dim background of mind we know what we ought to be doing but somehow we cannot start.

Individuality is founded in feeling; and the recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making, and directly perceive how events happen, and how work is actually done.

Is life worth living? It all depends on the liver.

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.

It is our attitude at the beginning of a difficult task which, more than anything else, will affect its successful outcome.

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.

It is wrong always, everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.