Human beings are born into this little span of life of which the best thing is its friendships and intimacies … and yet they leave their friendships and intimacies with no cultivation, to grow as they will by the roadside, expecting them to "keep" by force of mere inertia.
In the acquisition of a new habit, or the leaving off of an old one, we must take care to launch ourselves with as strong and decided an initiative as possible.
The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour.
If you only care enough for a result, you will almost certainly attain it. Only you must, then, really wish these things, and wish them exclusively, and not wish at the same time a hundred other incompatible things just as strongly.
Procrastination is attitude's natural assassin. There's nothing so fatiguing as an uncompleted task
An educated memory depends on an organized system of associations; and its goodness depends on two of their peculiarities: first, on the persistency of the associations; and, second, on their number.
The ideas gained by men before they are twenty-five are practically the only ideas they shall have in their lives.
For the moment, what we attend to is reality.
The attitude of unhappiness is not only painful, it is mean and ugly.
No living person is sunk so low as not to be imitated by somebody.
It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all.
So our self-feeling in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do.
The one who thinks over his experiences most, and weaves them into systematic relations with each other, will be the one with the best memory.
Each of us literally chooses, by his way of attending to things, what sort of universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit.
The world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck.
Fear of life in one form or another is the great thing to exorcise.
Whilst part of what we perceive comes through our senses from the object before us, another part (and it may be the larger part) always comes out of our own mind.
Emotional occasions, especially violent ones, are extremely potent in precipitating mental rearrangements. The sudden and explosive ways in which love, jealousy, guilt, fear, remorse, or anger can seize upon one are known to everybody. . . . And emotions that come in this explosive way seldom leave things as they found them.
No one sees further into a generalization than his own knowledge of detail extends.
A man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him.
The further limits of our being plunge, it seems to me, into an altogether other dimension of existence from the sensible and merely understandable world. Name it the mystical region, or the supernatural region, whichever you choose. So far as our ideal impulses originate in this region (and most of them do originate in it, for we find them possessing us in a way for which we cannot articulately account), we belong to it in a more intimate sense than that in which we belong to the visible world, for we belong in the most intimate sense wherever our ideals belong.
Any object not interesting in itself may become interesting through becoming associated with an object in which an interest already exists. The two associated objects grow, as it were, together; the interesting portion sheds its quality over the whole; and thus things not interesting in their own right borrow an interest which becomes as real and as strong as that of any natively interesting thing.
The first lecture in psychology that I ever heard was the first I ever gave.
Events are influenced by our very great desires.
Belief is desecrated when given to unproved and unquestioned statements for the solace and private pleasure of the believer . . . It is wrong always, everywhere, and for every one, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.
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