William James Quotes Page 4

“Lives based on having are less free than lives based either on doing or being.”

“The attitude of unhappiness is not only painful, it is mean and ugly. What can be more base and unworthy than the pining, puling, mumping mood, no matter by what outward ills it may have been engendered? What is more injurious to others? What less helpful as a way out of the difficulty? It but fastens and perpetuates the trouble which occasioned it, and increases the total evil of the situation. At all costs, then, we ought to reduce the sway of that mood; we ought to scout it in ourselves and others, and never show it tolerance.”

“There are two lives, the natural and the spiritual, and we must lose the one before we can participate in the other.”

“Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.”

“Science, like life, feeds on its own decay. New facts burst old rules; then newly divined conceptions bind old and new together into a reconciling law.”

“Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.”