"I would write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim.  I hope it is somewhat better than whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in explanation." (149)

"he so concrete, so living, I a mere table of contents, so abstract, a very snarl of twine.  yet in all my life i found scarce any soul that seemed to comprehend, naturally, (not) my concepts, but the mainspring of my life better than he did."

peirce on james

"Your If is the only peacemaker.  Much virtue in If."

Touchstone, As You Like It

"Prepare yourself in the subject so well that it shall always be on tap; then in the classroom trust your spontaneity and fling away all fartehr care" (WJ, Talks to Teachers)

"I have got my mind working on the infernal old problem of mind and brain, and how to construct the world out of pure experiences, and feel foiled again, and inwardly sick with the fever.  But I verily believe that it is only work that makes one sick in that way that has any chance of breaking old shells and getting a step ahead.  It is a sort of madness however when it is on you." 

WJ to Dickinson Miller re: writing

"pay primary attention to what we do and express, and not to care too much for what we feel."  "To wrestle with a bad feeling only pins our attention on it, and keeps it still fastened in the mind; whereas if we act as if from some better feeling, the old bad feeling soon folds its tent like an Arab and silently steals away"

ACT AS IF.

WJ, "Is Life Worth Living?"

"God [is] the native of these bleak rocks.  That need makes in morals the capital virtue of self-trust. We must hold hard to this poverty, however scandalous, and by more vigorous self-recovereis, after the sallies of action, possess our axis more firmly."

Emerson, "Experience," qtd in Poirier 12. 

"Purity, we see in the object-lesson, is not the one thing needful; and it is better that a life should contract many a dirt-mark, than forfeit usefulness in its efforts to remain unspotted" (Varieties, 354).