“How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness, is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure” 

“The greatest revolution of our generation is the discovery that human beings by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives” 

“All religions and spiritual traditions begin with the cry "Help!” 

“Wisdom is seeing something in a non-habitual manner.” 

“We know the meaning so long as no one asks us to define it.” 

“To suggest personal will and effort to one all sicklied o'er with the sense of irremediable impotence is to suggest the most impossible of things. What he craves is to be consoled in his very powerlessness, to feel that the spirit of the universe recognizes and secures him, all decaying and failing as he is.” 

“The first thing the intellect does with an object is to class it along with something else. But any object that is infinitely important to us and awakens our devotion feels to us also as if it must be sui generis and unique. Probably a crab would be filled with a sense of personal outrage if it could hear us class it without ado or apology as a crustacean, and thus dispose of it. "I am no such thing," it would say; "I am MYSELF, MYSELF alone.” 

“Everyone knows what attention is. It is taking possession of the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seems several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration of consciousness are of its essence. It implies a withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others.” 

“There's nothing so absurd that if you repeat it often enough, people will believe it.” 

“I know that you, ladies and gentlemen, have a philosophy, each and all of you, and that the most interesting and important thing about you is the way in which it determines the perspective in your several worlds.” 

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

“Psychology is the science of mental life” 

“Our colleges ought to have lit up in us a lasting relish for a better kind of man, a loss of appetite for mediocrities.” 

“Our intelligence cannot wall itself up alive, like a pupa in a chrysalis. It must at any cost keep on speaking terms with the universe that engendered it.” 

“The means have murdered the end.” 

“Whatever is beyond this narrow rational consciousness we mistake for our only consciousness.” 

“A man's Self is the sum total of all that he can call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house.” 

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

“In order to disprove the assertion that all crows are black, one white crow is sufficient.” 

“I will act as if what i do makes a difference.” 

“Our science is a drop, our ignorance a sea.” 

“What right have we to believe Nature under any obligation to do her work by means of complete minds only? She may find an incomplete mind a more suitable instrument for a particular purpose.” 

“As a rule reading fiction is as hard to me as trying to hit a target by hurling feathers at it. I need resistance to celebrate!” 

“To know is one thing, and to know for certain that we know is another. One” 

“Let any one try, I will not say to arrest, but to notice or attend to, the present moment of time. One of the most baffling experiences occurs. Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming.” 

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

“No fact in human nature is more characteristic than its willingness to live on a chance. The existence of the chance makes the difference… between a life of which the keynote is resignation and a life of which the keynote is hope.” 

“I fear to lose truth by the pretension to possess it already wholly.” 

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

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

“If merely 'feeling good' could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.” 

“A great nation is not saved by wars, it is saved by acts without external picturesqueness; by speaking, writing, voting reasonably; by smiting corruption swiftly; by good temper between parties; by the people knowing true men when they see them, and preferring them as leaders to rabid partisans and empty quacks.” 

“If you can change your mind, you can change your life.” 

“This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it.” 

“we have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood” 

“The strenuous life tastes better” 

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

“If this life is not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight.” 

“These then are my last words to you. Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.” 

“The best use of life is to spend it for something that outlasts it.” 

“Let's think the unthinkable, let's do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.” 

“A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.” 

“Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?” 

“He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it.” 

“I'd far rather be happy than right any day.” 

“If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.” 

Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

“I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day.” 

“Reality is frequently inaccurate.”