I believe four ingredients are necessary for happiness: health, warm personal relations, sufficient means to keep you from want, and successful work.

To like many people spontaneously and without effort is perhaps the greatest of all sources of personal happiness.

If I were a medical man, I should prescribe a holiday to any patient who considered his work important.

Joy of life... depends upon a certain spontaneity in regard to sex. Where sex is repressed, only work remains, and a gospel of work for work's sake never produced any work worth doing.

We do not like to be robbed of an enemy; we want someone to hate when we suffer. It is so depressing to think that we suffer because we are fools; yet, taking mankind in the mass, that is the truth.

If we were all given by magic the power to read each other's thoughts, I suppose the first effect would be to dissolve all friendships.

William James describes a man who got the experience from laughing-gas; whenever he was under its influence, he knew the secret of the universe, but when he came to, he had forgotten it. At last, with immense effort, he wrote down the secret before the vision had faded. When completely recovered, he rushed to see what he had written. It was 'A smell of petroleum prevails throughout'.