Quotes from William James

Pessimism leads to weakness, optimism to power.

Most people never run far enough on their first wind to find out they've got a second.

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

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

Man lives for science as well as bread.

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

As we take, in fact, a general view of the wonderful stream of our consciousness, what strikes us first is this different pace of its parts. Like a bird's life, it seems to be made of an alternation of flights and perchings.

There is but one cause of human failure. And that is man's lack of faith in his true Self.

[Thinking is] what a great many people think they are doing when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

The great use of life is to spend it for something that outlasts it.

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

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.