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Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.
William James, often called the “father of American psychology,” was not only a pioneering psychologist but also an eminent physiologist and philosopher, who happened to come from a family of notable figures. (His brother was the acclaimed novelist Henry James, and his sister, the diarist Alice James.) His wide-ranging fields of investigation gave us ideas such as “the stream of thought” and the concept of a baby’s impression of the world being “one great blooming, buzzing confusion.” Later in life, James helped establish the philosophical school known as pragmatism, in which, broadly speaking, an ideology is true if it works satisfactorily, but should be rejected if it’s impractical. This quote comes from an 1895 speech at Harvard University, in which James told students, “Be not afraid of life.” The very idea that life is worth living, he suggested, will lead to a worthy existence.
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