Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state.

We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone.

Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar on the neural paths.

Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day.

Be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points; do every day or two something for no other reason than that you would rather not do it.

When the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test.

Habit is the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent.

In the acquisition of a new habit, or the leaving off of an old one, we must take care to launch ourselves with as strong and decided an initiative as possible.

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.

Seize the very first possible opportunity to act on every resolution you make, and on every emotional prompting you may experience in the direction of the habits you aspire to gain.

It is not in the moment of their forming, but in the moment of their producing motor effects, that resolves and aspirations communicate the new 'set' to the brain.

No matter how full a reservoir of maxims one may possess, if one have not taken advantage of every concrete opportunity to act, one's character may remain entirely unaffected for the better.

A tendency to act only becomes ingrained when the act is repeated in physical reality.

Sow an action and you reap a habit; sow a habit and you reap a character; sow a character and you reap a destiny.

The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work.

We must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can.

There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.

Habit simplifies the movements required to achieve a given result, makes them more accurate and diminishes fatigue.

Our nervous system grows to the modes in which it has been exercised.

My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind.

Without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos.

The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will.

An education which should improve this faculty would be the education par excellence.

Consciousness does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A 'river' or a 'stream' are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described.

Every thought is part of a personal consciousness, always changing, sensibly continuous, and interested in some parts of its object to the exclusion of others.

The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.

The greatest effort of the human will is the effort of attention.

To sustain a representation, to hold it steady before the mind against distracting ideas, is the sovereign victory of the moral will.

Human beings have a tendency to perceive only what accords with their pre-existing interests.

Attention is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought.

Focalization, concentration of consciousness are of its essence.

It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others.

Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.

Our minds are not passive mirrors; they carve out reality according to our human purposes.

The deepest thing in our nature is this benevolent whisper: that reality is more than what appears to the senses.

We notice only what we have names for, and pass by the rest unseen.

A mind that cannot hold an idea steadily before itself is at the mercy of every transient impulse.

Whatever holds the attention controls the action.

The stream of thought is the primary reality of our inner life; all theories are secondary abstractions.

The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.

Human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind.

Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not.

Thus the sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our spontaneity of cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully, to look round cheerfully, and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there.

To feel brave, act as if we were brave, use all our will to that end, and a courage-fit will very likely replace the fit of fear.

Pessimism leads to weakness, optimism to power.

Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.

The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes.

If you want a quality, act as if you already had it.

Refuse to express a passion, and it dies. Count ten before venting your anger, and its occasion seems ridiculous.

Whistling to keep up courage is no mere figure of speech. On the other hand, sit all day in a moping posture, sigh, and reply to everything with a dismal voice, and your melancholy lingers.

There is no more valuable precept in moral education than this: smooth the brow, brighten the eye, contract the dorsal rather than the ventral aspect of the frame, and speak in a major key.

A sorrow which has found physical expression in wholesome activity is already half conquered.

Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being.

We all have reservoirs of life to draw upon, of which we do not dream.

Compared to what we ought to be, we are only half awake.

Our fires are damped, our drafts are checked. We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources.

The passion for peace of mind is one of the deepest instincts of the human heart.

Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.

Give up the futile fight against the inevitable; yield to reality and find your power within it.

Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.

Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events.

The ultimate test of what a truth means is indeed the conduct it dictates or inspires.

Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is still theoretically possible.

There are cases where a fact cannot come at all unless a preliminary faith exists in its coming.

In the ascent of a mountain, your belief that you can leap the chasm is the very factor that produces the spring in your muscles.

Refuse to believe, and you hesitate; hesitate, and you fall.

In the battle of life, belief is not an intellectual luxury; it is an active weapon.

Pragmatism unstiffens all our theories, limbers them up and puts each one to work.

Any idea upon which we can ride, any idea that will carry us prosperously from any one part of our experience to any other, is true for just so much.

The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief.

Ideas become true just in so far as they help us to get into satisfactory relation with other parts of our experience.

A philosopher is just a man who thinks in an unusually obstinate way.

Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits.

To know the truth requires a willing surrender of preconceived prejudices before the court of practical experience.

Doubt is an unstable equilibrium; the human mind longs for the solid ground of conviction.

Better by far to risk being deceived than to forfeit all possibility of truth through morbid dread of error.

A rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those kinds of truth were really there, would be an irrational rule.

We must live today by what truth we can get today, and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood.

Live out the active hypothesis; life will reveal whether your ground was firm.

The greatest thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.

The world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck.

If this life be 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.

The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

Whenever two people meet, there are really six people present: each as he sees himself, each as the other sees him, and each as he really is.

The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.

To be appreciated is the food that sustains the dignity of the spirit.

The unclouded breast conceives no terror of the coming days; it knows that tomorrow will be met as today has been.

There is but one cause of human failure. And that is man's lack of faith in his true Self.

Believe in the best, work for the best, and expect the best; and character will follow in your footsteps.

Every thought has a bodily consequence; to cultivate serene thought is to build a healthy organism.

The trailing clouds of glory are never completely dispersed from our consciousness.

True peace of mind does not come from the absence of storms, but from knowing yourself sovereign over the ship.

We must be willing to pay the price of admission to life, and that price is the risk of sorrow and disappointment.

To refuse to choose is itself a choice, and often the most cowardly choice of all.

He who has learned to accept hardship without bitterness has achieved the summit of psychological freedom.

Our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true.

The ultimate weapon of the soul is its capacity to decide what it will worship.

Live out your convictions with heroic energy; the world will make way for the person who knows where he is going.

The wound is the place where the light enters you.

What you seek is seeking you.

The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.

Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.

The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.

Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.

To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.

You cannot find peace by avoiding life.

One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.

Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.

Out of your vulnerabilities will come your strength.

And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.