How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure.
Interpretation
The pursuit and maintenance of happiness drives human actions and endurance.
William James suggests that the quest for happiness is a fundamental motivation behind human behavior and resilience. According to him, people’s actions, decisions, and the hardships they are willing to face are often influenced by their desire to attain, retain, or regain happiness, making it a central theme in life.
In practice
In a motivational speech about pursuing dreams, you might say this quote to emphasize the importance of happiness in our efforts.
Many persons nowadays seem to think that any conclusion must be very scientific if the arguments in favor of it are derived from twitching of frogs' legs (especially if the frogs are decapitated) and that, on the other hand, any doctrine chiefly vouched for by the feelings of human beings (with heads on their shoulders) must be benighted and superstitious.
The man who knows governments most completely is he who troubles himself least about a definition which shall give their essence. Enjoying an intimate acquaintance with all their particularities in turn, he would naturally regard an abstract conception in which these were unified as a thing more misleading than enlightening.
All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experience, factors to which the environment and the lessons it has so far taught us must learn to bend.
The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.
It is astonishing how many mental operations we can explain when we have once grasped the principles of association
As there is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it, so reasonable arguments, challenges to magnanimity, and appeals to sympathy or justice, are folly when we are dealing with human crocodiles and boa-constrictors.
It is the true duty of every man to promote the happiness of his fellow creatures to the utmost of his power.
I think self-knowledge is a key to happiness.We can build happy lives only on the foundation of our own natures, our own values, and our own interests.
The man is happiest who lives from day to day and asks no more, garnering the simple goodness of life.
Even people who believe they deserve to be happy and have nice things often don't feel worthy once they have them.
When once a man has made celebrity necessary to his happiness, he has put it in the power of the weakest and most timorous malignity, if not to take away his satisfaction, at least to withhold it. His enemies may indulge their pride by airy negligence and gratify their malice by quiet neutrality.
I am so fresh in soul and spirit that life gushes and bubbles around me in a thousand springs.
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