The transition from tenseness, self-responsibility, and worry, to equanimity, receptivity, and peace, is the most wonderful of all those shiftings of inner equilibrium, those changes of personal centre of energy, which I have analyzed so often; and the chief wonder of it is that it so often comes about, not by doing, but by simply relaxing and throwing the burden down.

It is only in the lonely emergencies of life that our creed is tested: then routine maxims fail, and we fall back on our gods.

Habit is the enormous flywheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision. Full half the time of such a man goes to the deciding, or regretting, of matters which ought to be so ingrained in him as practically not to exist for his consciousness at all.

Intellectualism' is the belief that our mind comes upon a world complete in itself, and has the duty of ascertaining its contents; but has no power of re-determining its character, for that is already given.

A new position of responsibility will usually show a man to be a far stronger creature than was supposed.

The emotions aren't always immediately subject to reason, but they are always immediately subject to action.

The God of many men is little more than their court of appeal against the damnatory judgment passed on their failures by the opinion of the world.