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Who really said it

Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact

Written by William James 1842–1910 · American philosopher & psychologist
Verified Free to reuse

These are the closing words of James’s essay “Is Life Worth Living?” — delivered as an address in May 1895 and published in the International Journal of Ethics that October, then collected in The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897). The full sentence is preceded by “Be not afraid of life.”

Last verified 16 Jul 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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“Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact” — William James, "Is Life Worth Living?" (1895)

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In context

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Provenance

The source

Work
“Is Life Worth Living?” (essay / address)
First published
International Journal of Ethics, vol. 6, no. 1, Oct. 1895, p. 24
Collected in
The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897)
Author
William James (1842–1910)

These, then, are my last words to you: Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact. The ‘scientific proof’ that you are right may not be clear before the day of judgment … is reached.

The closing lines of the essay. The popular quotation lifts the middle sentence; the fuller passage begins with James’s exhortation “Be not afraid of life.”

Full text of “Is Life Worth Living?”

How we verified this

Public domain

James wrote in English; “Is Life Worth Living?” was first published in 1895 and collected in 1897 — both well before 1931 — so the text is in the public domain in the United States.

Fact-check

Correctly credited — but usually cut short

This one is the exception among “famous name” quotes: it really is William James, word for word. What circulates is not a false attribution but a truncation.

William James mis-cited

The quotation almost always appears as the bare middle sentence, stripped of its source. In the essay it is the second of three sentences: “Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact” — see the primary text.

The wording is authentically James’s, from the close of “Is Life Worth Living?” (1895); the only distortion is dropping the opening line “Be not afraid of life,” as Quote Investigator documents.

Context

Belief as a self-fulfilling act

James delivered “Is Life Worth Living?” to the Harvard YMCA in 1895, arguing against the pessimism and suicidal despair he saw around him. His answer was neither blind optimism nor proof, but a wager: in some matters, believing that a thing is so helps make it so.

The closing exhortation gathers that argument into a single command. Conviction, for James, is not a passive report on reality but a force that can help bring the hoped-for reality into being — the heart of his “will to believe.”

Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

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Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Quote Investigator — full investigationquoteinvestigator.com

Traces the exact wording to James’s 1895 essay and credits him as author.
“Is Life Worth Living?” — full textmonadnock.net

Primary text of the essay, showing the closing passage verbatim.
The Will to Believe — Is Life Worth Living?en.wikisource.org

The 1897 collection where the essay was reprinted, in the public domain.
William Jamesen.wikipedia.org

Biography of the philosopher-psychologist and his pragmatist thought.
The Thinker Who Believed in Doingneh.gov

NEH feature on James’s life and pragmatist thought — it opens by quoting this very line.

The author

About William James

William James

1842–1910 · American philosopher & psychologist, a founder of pragmatism

William James was an American philosopher and psychologist, often called the father of American psychology and a leading figure in the pragmatist tradition. His major works include The Principles of Psychology (1890), The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), and the essay collection The Will to Believe (1897), in which “Is Life Worth Living?” appears. The idea that belief can be self-fulfilling — that conviction helps bring about the very fact it affirms — is central to his philosophy of the “will to believe.”

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Primary source — Chicago

William James, “Is Life Worth Living?” International Journal of Ethics 6, no. 1 (October 1895): 24; reprinted in The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (New York: Longmans, Green, 1897).

MLA (9th ed.)

James, William. “Is Life Worth Living?” International Journal of Ethics, vol. 6, no. 1, Oct. 1895, p. 24.

APA (7th ed.)

James, W. (1895). Is life worth living? International Journal of Ethics, 6(1), 24.

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Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact’?” Last verified 16 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/believe-that-life-is-worth-living-and-your-belief-will-help

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