Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly. The fundamental conceptions of psychology are practically very clear to us, but theoretically they are very confused, and one easily makes the obscurest assumptions in this science without realizing, until challenged, what internal difficulties they involve.
It does not follow, because our ancestors made so many errors of fact and mixed them with their religion, that we should therefore leave off being religious at all. By being religious we establish ourselves in possession of ultimate reality at the only points at which reality is given us to guard. Our responsible concern is with our private destiny, after all.
Good-humor is a philosophic state of mind; it seems to say to Nature that we take her no more seriously than she takes us. I maintain that one should always talk of philosophy with a smile.
This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it.
Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.
Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation.
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?
Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.
There is something almost shocking in the notion of so chaste a function carrying this Kantian hurlyburly in her womb.
In order to disprove the assertion that all crows are black, one white crow is sufficient.
Science, like life, feeds on its own decay. New facts burst old rules; then newly divined conceptions bind old and new together into a reconciling law.
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
The greatest discovery of any generation is that a human can alter his life by altering his attitude.