E.L. James Quotes

Religion is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism.

Language is the most imperfect and expensive means yet discovered for communicating thought.

Life is one long struggle between conclusions based on abstract ways of conceiving cases, and opposite conclusions prompted by our instinctive perception of them.

The good or bad is not in the circumstance, but only in the mind...that encounters it.

To neglect the wise sayings of great thinkers is to deny ourselves the truest education.

I will act as if I do make a difference.

All natural goods perish. Riches take wings; fame is a breath; love is a cheat; youth and health and pleasure vanish.

The deepest human need is the need to be appreciated.

The first thing to learn in intercourse with others is non-interference with their own particular ways of being happy, provided those ways do not assume to interfere by violence with ours.

Science, like life, feeds on its own decay. New facts burst old rules; then newly divined conceptions bind old and new together into a reconciling law.

Man lives by habits indeed, but what he lives for is thrill and excitements. ... From time immemorial war has been ... the supremely thrilling excitement.

Truth in our ideas means their power to work.

The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments.

What the whole community comes to believe in grasps the individual as in a vise.

Democracy is still upon its trial. The civic genius of our people is its only bulwark.

You must bring out of each word its practical cash-value, set it at work within the stream of your experience.

'Pure experience' is the name I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories.

A man with no philosophy in him is the most inauspicious and unprofitable of all possible social mates.

There can be no existence of evil as a force to the healthy-minded individual.

It is as important to cultivate your silence power as your word power.

As a rule reading fiction is as hard to me as trying to hit a target by hurling feathers at it. I need resistance to celebrate!

A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity.

Religious awe is the same organic thrill which we feel in a forest at twilight, or in a mountain gorge.

Lay plans as if we were to be immortal.

Men's activities are occupied into ways -- in grappling with external circumstances and in striving to set things at one in their own topsy-turvy mind.

Act in earnest and you will become earnest in all you do.

Habit is a second nature, or rather, it is 'ten times nature'.

Events are influenced by our very great desires.

Experience, as we know, has a way of boiling over, and making us correct our present formulas.

I am no lover of disorder and doubt as such. Rather do I fear to lose truth by this pretension to possess it already wholly.

Impulse without reason is enough, and reason without impulse is a poor makeshift.

Seek out that particular mental attribute which makes you feel most deeply and vitally alive.

Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is still theoretically possible ... faith is the readiness to act in a cause the prosperous issue of which is not certified to us in advance.

Where quality is the thing sought after, the thing of supreme quality is cheap, whatever the price one has to pay for it.

The more rational statement is that we feel sorry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and not that we cry, strike, or tremble because we are sorry, angry, or fearful as the case may be.

For morality life is a war, and the service of the highest is a sort of cosmic patriotism which also calls for volunteers.

The question of free will is insoluble on strictly psychological grounds.

The examining physician often hesitates to make the necessary examination because it involves soiling the finger.

When we talk about democracy, if the people's stomach is empty, democracy is also empty. Democracy can not be installed by fiat; it must be achieved by the people themselves.

True independence is not a gift to be received. It can't be a hand-out to people. It must be an achievement by the people.

Love means never having to be apart

There is only one religion - it is a way a man dies.

God dances with the outcast.

Sometimes I wonder if there's something wrong with me. Perhaps I've spent too long in the company of my literary romantic heroes, and consequently my ideals and expectations are far too high.

It was as important to live poetically as to write poems.

Follow the evidence to where it leads, even if the conclusion is uncomfortable.

First the priests arrive. Then the conquistadores.

Her reputation for reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic.

I don't give a crap if you're a Tangent or a really smart llama. You're my friend and that's all that matters

He inherited some good instincts from his Quaker forebearers, but by diligent hard work, he overcame them.