William James Quotes

In the end, I want to be able to say, 'My life was what I made it.'

Everybody eventually discovers that they are an individual with the power to affect their own lives and make it better or not.

It takes half your life before you discover life is a do-it-yourself project.

The most important thing in my life is to live my life and enjoy it - to do what I think is right and what I think is good.

I'm so in control of my life, you shouldn't dislike anything I do-because I'm not only in the best place I've ever been, but it keeps getting better and better.

I invented my life by taking for granted that everything I did not like would have an opposite, which I would like.

Life will always be to a large extent what we ourselves make it.

The good life consists in deriving happiness by using your signature strengths every day in the main realms of living. The meaningful life adds one more component: using these same strengths to forward knowledge, power or goodness.

One creates oneself.

Now, everything I do, I do because I want to. And I believe the best is yet to come.

Give people the power to shape their lives to their liking, and their souls will take care of themselves.

We are what we make.

You are the only thing holding you back from happiness. You have the ability to change your life radically for better or worse.

You were not born a winner, and you were not born a loser. You are what you make yourself be.

Take responsibility for making your own life beautiful.

There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point… The truly adult view, by contrast, is that our life is as meaningful, as full and as wonderful as we choose to make it.

In my later years, I have looked in the mirror each day and found a happy person staring back. Occasionally I wonder why I can be so happy. The answer is that every day of my life I've worked only for myself and for the joy that comes from writing and creating. The image in my mirror is not optimistic, but the result of optimal behavior.

Bader's philosophy was my philosophy. His whole attitude to life was mine.

The past explains how I got here, but the future is up to me - and I love to live life at full throttle.

I don't want to be someone's reason to hate their life. I want to be someone's reason to seek something more in their life.

I think the future is whatever I'm willing to make it.

On some level, we as human beings can be who we want to be.

Each man must look to himself to teach him the meaning of life. It is not something discovered: it is something molded.

It's all in how you look at your life, because no one has a wonderful life. But you can make it what you want it to be.

I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.