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.
Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things. In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf.
Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs pass, so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them.
Those thoughts are truth which guide us to beneficial interaction with sensible particulars as they occur, whether they copy these in advance or not.
One hearty laugh together will bring enemies into a closer communion of heart than hours spent on both sides in inward wrestling with the mental demon of uncharitable feeling.
Man lives for science as well as bread.
Individuality is founded in feeling; and the recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making, and directly perceive how events happen, and how work is actually done.
'Pure experience' is the name I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories.
A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and life is after all a chain.
Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has no use. No faith in anything of that cheap kind!
Where quality is the thing sought after, the thing of supreme quality is cheap, whatever the price one has to pay for it.
An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible.
The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments.
We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable.
The aim of a college education is to teach you to know a good man when you see one.
Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is theoretically possible.
No matter how full a reservoir of maxims one may possess, and no matter how good one's sentiments may be, if one has not taken advantage of every concrete opportunity to act, one's character may remain entirely unaffected for the better.
Whenever you're in conflict with someone, there is one factor that can make the difference between damaging your relationship and deepening it. That factor is attitude.
There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied upon to do, and that is to contradict other philosophers.
What every genuine philosopher (every genuine man, in fact) craves most is praise although the philosophers generally call it recognition!