William James quotes for UPSC

Tell him to live by yes and no — yes to everything good, no to everything bad.

An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible.

We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause.

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.

We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar. ...Nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out.

Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.

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

It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all. And often enough our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true.

If things are ever to move upward, some one must take the first step, and assume the risk of it. No one who is not willing to try charity, to try non-resistance as the saint is always willing, can tell whether these methods will or will not succeed.

The most any one can do is to confess as candidly as he can the grounds for the faith that is in him, and leave his example to work on others as it may.

Democracy is still upon its trial. The civic genius of our people is its only bulwark.

The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.

The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal.

Our colleges ought to have lit up in us a lasting relish for the better kind of man, a loss of appetite for mediocrities, and a disgust for cheapjacks. We ought to smell, as it were, the difference of quality in men and their proposals when we enter the world of affairs about us.

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

First, you know, a new theory is attacked as absurd; then it is admitted to be true, but obvious and insignificant; finally it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim that they themselves discovered it.

So long as antimilitarists propose no substitute for war's disciplinary function, no moral equivalent of war, analogous, as one might say, to the mechanical equivalent of heat, so long they fail to realize the full inwardness of the situation.

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

There is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it.

Real culture lives by sympathies and admirations, not by dislikes and disdain — under all misleading wrappings it pounces unerringly upon the human core.

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

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

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.

As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use.

There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.

Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor.

Wherever you are it is your own friends who make your world.