William James

Action may not bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action.

The boy gathers materials for a temple, and then when he is thirty, concludes to build a woodshed.

Nothing is more important than reconnecting with your bliss. Nothing is as rich. Nothing is more real.

Esther liked books out where everyone could see them, a sort of graphic index to the intricate labyrinth of her mind arrayed to impress the most casual guest, a system of immediate introduction which she had found to obtain in a number of grimy intellectual households in Greenwich Village.

The first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.

Want is a growing giant whom the coat of Have was never large enough to cover.

The rich mind lies in the sun and sleeps, and is Nature.

Life gives nothing to man without labor.

Who ever is out of patience is out of possession of their soul.

There is no value in life except what you choose to place upon it and no happiness in any place except what you bring to it yourself.

The best place to seek God is in a garden. You can dig for him there.

The world will never be long without some good reason to hate the unhappy; their real faults are immediately detected, and if those are not sufficient to sink them into infamy, an additional weight of calumny will be super added.

A man’s ignorance sometimes is not only useful, but beautiful-while his knowledge, so called, is oftentimes worse than useless, besides being ugly.

Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life. The conviction of the rich that the poor are happier is no more foolish than the conviction of the poor that the rich are.

I suppose every old scholar has had the experience of reading something in a book which was significant to him, but which he could never find again. Sure he is that he read it there, but no one else ever read it, nor can he find it again, though he buy the book and ransack every page.

We shape our dwellings, and afterwards our dwellings shape us.