Lisi > Lisi's Quotes

“Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action. ”
― William James

“The art of being wise is knowing what to overlook.”
― William James

“We are like islands in the sea, separate on the surface but connected in the deep.”
― William James

“A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.”
― William James

“The greatest discovery of any generation is that a human can alter his life by altering his attitude.”
― William James

“Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.”
― William James

“To change one’s life:
1. Start immediately.
2. Do it flamboyantly.
3. No exceptions.”
― William James

“The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.”
― William James

“Whenever two people meet, there are really six people present. There is each man as he sees himself, each man as the other person sees him, and each man as he really is.”
― William James

“Seek out that particular mental attribute which makes you feel most deeply and vitally alive, along with which comes the inner voice which says, 'This is the real me,' and when you have found that attitude, follow it.”
― William James, The Principles of Psychology

“Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.”
― William James, The Will to Believe : and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy

“If you can change your mind, you can change your life.”
― William James

“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.”
― William James

“The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.”
― William James

“The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.”
― William James

“Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.”
― William James

“I am done with great things and big things, great institutions and big success, and I am for those tiny, invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, yet which if you give them time, will rend the hardest monuments of man's pride.”
― William James

“To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our minds,”
― William James

“Anything you may hold firmly in your imagination can be yours.”
― William James

“Our view of the world is truly shaped by what we decide to hear.”
― William James

“Begin to be now what you will be hereafter. ”
― William James

“Good-humor is a philosophic state of mind; it seems to say to Nature that we take her no more seriously than she takes us. I maintain that one should always talk of philosophy with a smile.”
― William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

“There are no differences but differences of degree between different degrees of difference and no difference.”
― William James

“Wherever you are, it is your friends who make your world.”
― William James

“Human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.”
― William James

“Beyond the very extremity of fatigue distress, amounts of ease and power that we never dreamed ourselves to own, sources of strength habitually not taxed at all, because habitually we never push through the obstruction”
― William James

“We may be in the Universe as dogs and cats are in our libraries, seeing the books and hearing the conversation, but having no inkling of the
meaning of it all.”
― William James

“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.”
― William James

“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.”
― William James

“A man has as many social selves as there are distinct groups of persons about whose opinion he cares. He generally shows a different side of himself to each of these different groups.”
― William James