“A life that is burdened with expectations is a heavy life. Its fruit is sorrow and disappointment.” 

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.

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

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

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

“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.” 

“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.” 

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

“The strenuous life tastes better” 

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

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

“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.” 

“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.” 

“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.” 

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

“Psychology is the science of mental life” 

“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.” 

“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.” 

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

“All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits.” 

“Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation.” 

“Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life. Each lapse is like the letting fall of a ball of string which one is carefully winding up; a single slip undoes more than a great many turns will wind again.” 

“Pragmatism asks its usual question. "Grant an idea or belief to be true," it says, "what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone's actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth's cash-value in experiential terms?” 

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