Top 100 William James Quotes
#1. Pessimism leads to weakness, optimism to power.
William James
#2. Organization and method mean much, but contagious human characters mean more in a university.
William James
#3. When you have to make a choice and don't make it, that is in itself a choice.
William James
#4. The teachers of this country, one may say, have its future in their hands.
William James
#5. If you can change your mind, you can change your life.
William James
#6. Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being.
William James
#7. I take it that no man is educated who has never dallied with the thought of suicide.
William James
#8. An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force of revelation.
William James
#9. Psychology saves us from mistakes. It makes us more clear as to what we are about. We gain confidence in respect to any method which we are using as soon as we believe that it has theory as well as practice at its back.
William James
#10. A solemn state of mind is never crude or simple - it seems to contain a certain measure of its own opposite in solution. A solemn joy preserves a sort of bitter in its sweetness; a solemn sorrow is one to which we intimately consent.
William James
#11. Our intelligence cannot wall itself up alive, like a pupa in a chrysalis. It must at any cost keep on speaking terms with the universe that engendered it.
William James
#12. To spend life for something which outlasts it.
William James
#13. There are two lives, the natural and the spiritual, and we must lose the one before we can participate in the other.
William James
#15. Every time a resolve or fine glow of feeling evaporates without bearing fruit, it is worse than a chance lost; it works to hinder future emotions from taking the normal path of discharge.
William James
#16. Religious awe is the same organic thrill which we feel in a forest at twilight, or in a mountain gorge.
William James
#17. Real servants don't try to use God for their purposes. They let God use them for His purposes.
William James
#18. Asceticism may be a mere expression of organic hardihood, disgusted with too much ease.
William James
#19. A paradise of inward tranquility seems to be faith's usual result.
William James
#20. Materialism means simply the denial that the moral order is eternal, and the cutting off of ultimate hopes; spiritualism means theaffirmation of an eternal moral order and the letting loose of hope.
William James
#21. In order to disprove the assertion that all crows are black, one white crow is sufficient.
William James
#22. An enormous mass of experience, both of homeopathic doctors and their patients, is invoked in favor of the efficacy of these remedies and doses.
William James
#23. Religion ... shall mean for us the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude.
William James
#24. Knowledge about life is one thing; effective occupation of a place in life, with its dynamic currents passing through your being, is another.
William James
#25. Better risk loss of truth than chance of error
that is your faith-vetoer's exact position. He is actively playing his stake as much as the believer is; he is backing the field against the religious hypothesis, just as the believer is backing the religious hypothesis against the field.
William James
#26. The exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess sucess is our national disease
William James
#27. He who refuses to embrace a unique opportunity loses the prize as surely as if he had failed.
William James
#28. All that we need explicitly to note is that, the more the passive attention is relied on, by keeping the material interesting; and the less the kind of attention requiring effort is appealed to; the more smoothly and pleasantly the classroom work goes on.
William James
#29. Where [God] is, tragedy is only provisional and partial, and shipwreck and dissolution are not the absolutely final things.
William James
#31. The general law is that no mental modification ever occurs which is not accompanied or followed by a bodily change.
William James
#32. Modern man ... has not ceased to be credulous ... the need to believe haunts him.
William James
#33. O my Bergson, you are a magician, and your book is a marvel, a real wonder in the history of philosophy ... In finishing it I found ... such a flavor of persistent euphony, as of a rich river that never foamed or ran thin, but steadily and firmly proceeded with its banks full to the brim.
William James
#34. Our belief at the beginning of a doubtful undertaking is the one thing that assures the successful outcome of any venture.
William James
#35. Formula to live your dream: 1. Be bold. 2. Begin now, 3. No exceptions.
William James
#36. Language is the most imperfect and expensive means yet discovered for communicating thought.
William James
#37. It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all. And often enough our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true.
William James
#38. No living person is sunk so low as not to be imitated by somebody.
William James
#39. The theorizing mind tends always to the over-simplification of its materials. This is the root of all that absolutism and one-sided dogmatism by which both philosophy and religion have been infested.
William James
#40. Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.
William James
#41. The error is needed to set off the truth, much as a dark background is required for exhibiting the brightness of a picture. And
William James
#42. To know an object is to lead to it through a context which the world provides
William James
#44. The word 'cause' is an altar to an unknown god.
William James
#45. The squalid cash interpretation put on the word success - is our national disease.
William James
#46. Habit simplifies our movements, makes them accurate, and diminishes fatigue.
William James
#47. [Pragmatism's] only test of probable truth is what works best in the way of leading us, what fits every part of life best and combines with the collectivity of experience's demands, nothing being omitted.
William James
#48. You make a great, very great mistake, if you think that psychology, being the science of the mind's laws, is something from which you can deduce definite programmes and schemes and methods of instruction for immediate schoolroom use.
William James
#49. In modern eyes, precious though wars may be they must not be waged solely for the sake of the ideal harvest. Only when forced upon one, is a war now thought permissible.
William James
#50. As the brain changes are continuous, so do all these consciousnesses melt into each other like dissolving views. Properly they are but one protracted consciousness, one unbroken stream.
William James
#51. Moreover, something is or seems That touches me with mystic gleams, Like glimpses of forgotten dreams - "Of something felt, like something here; Of something done, I know not where; Such as no language may declare."[228]
William James
#53. Few people have definitely articulated philosophies of their own. But almost everyone has his own peculiar sense of a certain total character in the universe, and of the inadequacy of fully to match it [to] the peculiar systems that he knows.
William James
#54. The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.
William James
#55. The simplest rudiment of mystical experience would seem to be that deepened sense of the significance of a maxim or formula which occasionally sweeps over one.
William James
#56. We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause.
William James
#57. Genius is the capacity for seeing relationships where lesser men see none.
William James
#58. A new position of responsibility will usually show a man to be a far stronger creature than was supposed.
William James
#59. In the acquisition of a new habit, or the leaving off of an old one, we must take care to launch ourselves with as strong and decided an initiative as possible.
William James
#61. Impulse without reason is not enough, and reason without impulse is a poor makeshift.
William James
#62. The faith state ... is the psychic correlate of a biological growth reducing contending-desires to one direction ... [p.272]
William James
#63. The man whose acquisitions stick is the man who is always achieving and advancing whilst his neighbors, spending most of their time in relearning what they once knew but have forgotten, simply hold their own.
William James
#64. Human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.
William James
#65. Modern war is so expensive that we feel trade to be a better avenue to plunder; but modern man inherits all the innate pugnacity and all the love of glory of his ancestors.
William James
#66. Smitten as we are with the vision of social righteousness, a God indifferent to everything but adulation, and full of partiality for his individual favorites, lacks an essential element of largeness.
William James
#67. The intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally comes.
William James
#69. To be fertile in hypotheses is the first perquisite of creativity and to be willing to throw them away the moment experience contradicts them is the next.
William James
#70. By far the most usual way of handling phenomena so novel that they would make for a serious rearrangement of our preconceptions is to ignore them altogether, or to abuse those who bear witness for them.
William James
#71. Do something everyday for no other reason than you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test.
William James
#72. If things are ever to move upward, some one must take the first step, and assume the risk of it. No one who is not willing to try charity, to try non-resistance as the saint is always willing, can tell whether these methods will or will not succeed.
William James
#73. We have nothing to do but to receive, resting absolutely upon the merit , power , and love of our Redeemer.
William James
#74. Between what a man calls me and what he simply calls mine the line is difficult to draw. We feel and act about certain things that are ours very much as we feel and act about ourselves.
William James
#75. Once you accept an idea, it's an idea whose time has come.
William James
#76. Marvelous as may be the power of my dog to understand my moods, deathless as his affection and fidelity, his mental state is as unsolved a mystery to me as it was to my remotest ancestor.
William James
#77. I know that you, ladies and gentlemen, have a philosophy, each and all of you, and that the most interesting and important thing about you is the way in which it determines the perspective in your several worlds.
William James
#78. A winner's attitude: it may be difficult, but it's possible. A loser's attitude: It may be possible, but it's too difficult.
William James
#79. If you want to change your life, do it flamboyantly and start immediately.
William James
#80. Religions have approved themselves; they have ministered to sundry vital needs which they found reigning. When they violated other needs too strongly, or when other faiths came which served the same needs better, the first religions were supplanted.
William James
#81. Habit is second nature, or rather ... ten times nature.
William James
#82. Truth, as any dictionary will tell you, is a property of certain of our ideas. It means their agreement, as falsity means their disagreement, with reality.
William James
#83. The university most worthy of rational admiration is that one in which your lonely thinker can feel himself lonely, most positively furthered, and most richly fed
William James
#84. If an unusual necessity forces us onward, a surprising thing occurs. The fatigue gets worse up to a certain point, when, gradually or suddenly, it passes away and we are fresher than before!
William James
#85. Spiritual energy flows in and produces effects in the phenomenal world.
William James
#86. What every genuine philosopher (every genuine man, in fact) craves most is praise although the philosophers generally call it recognition!
William James
#87. Everyone knows that on any given day there are energies slumbering in him which the incitement's of that day do not call forth. Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. The human individual usually lives far within his limits.
William James
#88. Tension is a habit. Relaxing is a habit. Bad habits can be broken, good habits formed.
William James
#89. We are proud of a human nature that could be so passionately extreme, but we shrink from advising others to follow the example.
William James
#90. We need only in cold blood ACT as if the thing in question were real, and keep acting as if it were real, and it will infallibly end by growing into such a connection with our life that it will become real.
William James
#91. What the whole community comes to believe in grasps the individual as in a vise.
William James
#92. Edwards says elsewhere: "I am bold to say that the work of God in the conversion of one soul, considered together with the source foundation, and purchase of it, and also the benefit, end, and eternal issue of it, is a more glorious work of God than the creation of the whole material universe.
William James
#93. The instant field of the present is at all times what I call the 'pure' experience. It is only virtually or potentially either object or subject as yet.
William James
#94. So it is with children who learn to read fluently and well: They begin to take flight into whole new worlds as effortlessly as young birds take to the sky.
William James
#95. We may be in the Universe as dogs and cats are in our libraries, seeing the books and hearing the conversation, but having no inkling of the
meaning of it all.
William James
#96. On pragmatistic principles, if the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word, it is true.
William James
#98. The essence of genius is to know what to overlook.
William James
#99. Faith is one of the forces by which men live, and the total absence of it means collapse
William James
#100. Success or failure depends more upon attitude than upon capacity successful men act as though they have accomplished or are enjoying something. Soon it becomes a reality. Act, look, feel successful, conduct yourself accordingly, and you will be amazed at the positive results.
William James
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