Great Throughts Treasury

"If you want a quality, act as if you already had it. Try the as if technique."

"Impulse without reason is not enough, and reason without impulse is a poor makeshift."

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

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

"In modern eyes, precious though wars may be they must not be waged solely for the sake of the ideal harvest. Only when forced upon one, is a war now thought permissible."

"It makes a tremendous emotional and practical difference to one whether one accepts the universe in the drab discolored way of stoic resignation to necessity, or with the passionate happiness of Christian saints."

"Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than that you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test."

"Let everything you do be done as if it makes a difference."

"Man can alter his life by altering his thinking."

"Many persons nowadays seem to think that any conclusion must be very scientific if the arguments in favor of it are derived from twitching of frogs' legs (especially if the frogs are decapitated) and that, on the other hand, any doctrine chiefly vouched for by the feelings of human beings (with heads on their shoulders) must be benighted and superstitious."

"In the deepest heart of all of us there is a corner in which the ultimate mystery of things works sadly."

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

"It is a fact that in each of us, when awake (and often when asleep), some kind of consciousness is always going on. There is a stream, a succession of states, or waves, or fields (or of whatever you please to call them), of knowledge, of feeling, of desire, of deliberation, etc., that constantly pass and re-pass, and that constitute our inner life. The existence of this stream is the primal fact, the nature and origin of it form the essential problem, of our science."

"It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all."

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

"Men are now proud of belonging to a conquering nation, and without a murmur they lay down their persons and their wealth, if by so doing they may fend off subjection."

"Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly."

"Modern war is so expensive that we feel trade to be a better avenue to plunder; but modern man inherits all the innate pugnacity and all the love of glory of his ancestors."

"My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will."

"Need and struggle are what excite and inspire us; our hour of triumph is what brings the void. Not the Jews of the captivity, but those of the days of Solomon's glory are those from whom the pessimistic utterances in our Bible come."

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

"My thinking is first and last and always for the sake of my doing."

"Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make very small use of their possible consciousness and of their soul's resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole bodily organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger."

"Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task."

"Of all the beautiful truths pertaining to the soul, none is more gladdening or fruitful than to know You can regenerate and make yourself what you will."

"One hearty laugh together will bring enemies into a closer communion of heart than hours spent on both sides in inward wrestling with the mental demon of uncharitable feeling."

"Only necessity understood, and bondage to the highest is identical with true freedom."

"Our belief at the beginning of a doubtful undertaking is the one thing that assures the successful outcome of any venture."

"Our esteem for facts has not neutralized in us all religiousness. It is itself almost religious. Our scientific temper is devout."

"Our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest. The maple and the pine may whisper to each other with their leaves... but the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands also hang together through the ocean's bottom."

"Religion is the monumental chapter in the history of human egotism."

"Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits."

"Pretend what we may, the whole man within us is at work when we form our philosophical opinions. Intellect, will, taste, and passion co-operate just as they do in practical affairs; and lucky it is if the passion be not something as petty as a love of personal conquest over the philosopher across the way."

"Pessimism leads to weakness, optimism to power."

"Religion must be considered vindicated in a certain way from the attacks of her critics."

"The aim of a college education is to teach you to know a good man when you see one."

"Religion, whatever it is, is a man's total reaction upon life."

"The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook."

"The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community."

"The best way to define a man's character would be to seek out the particular mental or moral attitude in which, when it came upon him, he felt himself most deeply and intensely active and alive. At such moments there is a voice inside which speaks and says: 'This is the real me!'"

"The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated."

"The greatest discovery of any generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitude."

"The first lecture in psychology that I ever heard was the first I ever gave."

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

"The hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioning our characters in the wrong way."

"The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another."

"The greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths."

"The ideas gained by men before they are twenty-five are practically the only ideas they shall have in their lives."

"The impulse to take life strivingly is indestructible in the race."

"The man whose acquisitions stick is the man who is always achieving and advancing whilst his neighbors, spending most of their time in relearning what they once knew but have forgotten, simply hold their own."