I don't see how an epigram, being a bolt from the blue, with no introduction or cue, ever gets itself writ.

I wished by treating Psychology like a natural science, to help her become one.

Despair lames most people, but it wakes others fully up.

The suspicion is in the air nowadays that the superiority of one of our formulas to another may not consist so much in its literal 'objectivity,' as in subjective qualities like its usefulness, its 'elegance,' or its congruity with our residual beliefs.

We are not only gregarious animals, liking to be in sight of our fellows, but we have an innate propensity to get ourselves noticed, and noticed favorably, by our kind.

To be a real philosopher all that is necessary is to hate some one else's type of thinking.

Truth for us is simply a collective name for verification processes.

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

We must be careful not to confuse data with the abstractions we use to analyse them.

If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, you mustn't seek to show that no crows are; it is enough if you prove one single crow to be white.

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

The deepest craving of human nature is the need to be appreciated.

How pleasant is the day when we give up striving to be young-or slender.

Language is the most imperfect and expensive means yet discovered for communicating thought.

The difference between an interesting and a tedious teacher consists in little more than the inventiveness by which the one is able to mediate these associations and connections, and in the dullness in discovering such transitions which the other shows.

In teaching, you must simply work your pupil into such a state of interest in what you are going to teach him that every other object of attention is banished from his mind; then reveal it to him so impressively that he will remember the occasion to his dying day; and finally fill him with devouring curiosity to know what the next steps in connection with the subject are.

Give up the feeling of responsibility, let go your hold, resign the care of your destiny to higher powers, be genuinely indifferent as to what becomes of it all and you will find not only that you gain a perfect inward relief, but often also, in addition, the particular goods you sincerely thought you were renouncing.

The perfect stillness of the night was thrilled by a more solemn silence. The darkness held a presence that was all the more felt because it was not seen. I could not any more have doubted that HE was there than that I was. Indeed, I felt myself to be, if possible, the less real of the two.

We forget that every good that is worth possessing must be paid for in strokes of daily effort. We postpone and postpone until those smiling possibilities are dead... By neglecting the necessary concrete labor, by sparing ourselves the little daily tax, we are positively digging the graves of our higher possibilities.

When you have to make a choice and don't make it, that is in itself a choice.