Top 100 James William Quotes
#1. The ideas gained by men before they are twenty-five are practically the only ideas they shall have in their lives.
William James
#2. The teachers of this country, one may say, have its future in their hands.
William James
#3. Psychology ought certainly to give the teacher radical help.
William James
#4. Man is essentially the imitative animal. His whole educabilityand in fact the whole history of civilization depend on this trait, which his strong tendencies to rivalry, jealousy, and acquisitiveness reinforce.
William James
#5. Humanism ... is not a single hypothesis or theorem, and it dwells on no new facts. It is rather a slow shifting in the philosophic perspective, making things appear as from a new centre of interest or point of sight.
William James
#6. The deepest hunger in human beings is the desire to be appreciated.
William James
#7. The last peculiarity of consciousness to which attention is to be drawn in this first rough description of its stream is that it is always interested more in one part of its object than in another, and welcomes and rejects, or chooses, all the while it thinks.
William James
#8. Most unhappiness is caused because people listen to themselves ... instead of talking to themselves.
William James
#9. A man's Self is the sum total of all that he can call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house.
William James
#10. On August 26 the Assembly responded by conferring French citizenship upon Joseph Priestley, Jeremy Bentham, William Wilberforce, Anacharsis Cloots, Johann Pestalozzi, Thaddeus Kosciusko, Friedrich Schiller, George Washington, Thomas Paine, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton.
Will Durant
#11. (This was long after hairdressers; in truth, ever since there have been women, there have been hairdressers, Adam being the first, though the King James scholars do their very best to muddy this point.)
William Goldman
#12. There can be no final truth in ethics any more than in physics, until the last man has had his experience and said his say.
William James
#13. David McKay, 1900. Wolfe, Thomas. Look Homeward, Angel. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1929. Yeats, William Butler. A Vision
James Hollis
#14. Each of us literally chooses, by his way of attending to things, what sort of universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit.
William James
#15. It is only in the lonely emergencies of life that our creed is tested: then routine maxims fail, and we fall back on our gods.
William James
#16. Invention, using the term most broadly, and imitation, are the two legs, so to call them, on which the human race historically has walked.
William James
#17. Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance.
William James
#18. All religions and spiritual traditions begin with the cry Help!
William James
#19. The pragmatist turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns toward concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action, and towards power.
William James
#20. Is life worth living? It all depends on the liver.
William James
#21. Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits. It works in the minutest crannies and it opens out the widest vistas.
William James
#22. Most people never run far enough on their first wind to find out they've got a second.
William James
#23. Individuality outruns all classification, yet we insist on classifying every one we meet under some general head.
William James
#24. It is so human a book that I don't see how belief in its divine authority can survive the reading of it.
William James
#25. An acre of performance is worth the whole Land of promise
James Howell
#26. Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day.
William James
#27. There must be something solemn, serious, and tender about any attitude which we denominate religious. If glad, it must not grin or snicker; if sad, it must not scream or curse.
William James
#28. Our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest, which co-mingle their roots in the darkness underground.
William James
#29. If merely 'feeling good' could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.
William James
#30. It may be that no religious reconciliation with the absolute totality of things is possible. Some evils, indeed, are ministerial to higher forms of good; but it may be that there are forms of evil so extreme as to enter into no good system whatsoever ...
William James
#31. 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
#32. Evil is a disease; and worry over disease is itself an additional form of disease, which only adds to the original complaint.
William James
#33. An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force of revelation.
William James
#34. I take it that no man is educated who has never dallied with the thought of suicide.
William James
#36. Whenever two people meet, there are really six people present. There is each man as he sees himself, each man as the other person sees him, and each man as he really is.
William James
#37. A man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him.
William James
#38. To leap across an abyss, one is better served by faith than doubt.
William James
#39. When you have to make a choice and don't make it, that is in itself a choice.
William James
#40. Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being.
William James
#41. If you can change your mind, you can change your life.
William James
#42. All our life," William James told us in the prologue, "so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits - practical, emotional, and intellectual - systematically organized for our weal or woe, and bearing us irresistibly toward our destiny, whatever the latter may be."9.29
Charles Duhigg
#44. No bell in us tolls to let us know for certain when truth is in our grasp.
William James
#45. Strength is a facade for the proud, weakness is a mask for the lazy.
William James
#46. I'm not concerned with whether you got to the top. I want to know how far you climbed. That is where the real achievement is found.
William James Moore
#47. Faith branches off the highroad before reason begins
William James
#48. The difference between objective and subjective extension is one of relation to a context solely.
William James
#49. To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our minds,
William James
#51. The attempt at introspective analysis ... is in fact like seizing a spinning top to catch its motion, or trying to turn up the gas quickly enough to see the darkness.
William James
#52. Most men have a good memory for facts connected with their own pursuits.
William James
#53. Despair lames most people, but it wakes others fully up.
William James
#54. The truth remains that, after adolescence has begun, "words, words, words," must constitute a large part, and an always larger part as life advances, of what the human being has to learn.
William James
#55. To love, to be loved, and to be useful: these are the most important elements in a happy, meaningful life, and they can be achieved anywhere.
Syrie James
#56. To consider hypotheses is surely always better than to dogmatize ins blaue hinein
William James
#57. So far war has been the only force that can discipline a whole community, and until an equivalent discipline is organized, I believe that war must have its way.
William James
#58. No reception without reaction, no impression without correlative expression, -this is the great maxim which the teacher ought never to forget.
William James
#59. Unfortunately, only a small number of patients with peptic ulcer are financially able to make a pet of an ulcer.
William James Mayo
#60. But facts are facts, and if we only get enough of them theyare sure to combine.
William James
#61. the Christian who seems to be so overmatched, is yet so unconquerable, II Cor. 12:9; James 5:11.
William Gurnall
#62. We all have reservoirs of life to draw upon, of which we do not dream.
William James
#63. A good hypothesis in science must have other properties than those of the phenomenon it is immediately invoked to explain, otherwise it is not prolific enough.
William James
#64. A stream of ideal tendency embedded in the external structure of the world.
William James
#65. Objective evidence and certitude are doubtless very fine ideals to play with, but where on this moonlit and dream-visited planet are they found?
William James
#66. William James said, "You cannot travel without until you have travelled within." Socrates said, "The unexamined life is not worth living." People who discover their sweet spot are people who take the inward journey and examine themselves. They make the choice to live until they die.
Scott M. Fay
#67. A Beethoven string-quartet is truly, as some one has said, a scraping of horses' tails on cats' bowels, and may be exhaustively described in such terms; but the application of this description in no way precludes the simultaneous applicability of an entirely different description.
William James
#68. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. Not through mere perversity do men run after it.
William James
#69. William James once said: "Progress is a terrible thing." It is more than that: it is also a highly ambiguous notion. For who knowsbut that a little further on the way a bridge may not have collapsed or a crevice split the earth?
Johan Huizinga
#71. Both thought and feeling are determinants of conduct, and the same conduct may be determined either by feeling or by thought.
William James
#72. It would probably astound each of us beyond measure to be let into his neighbors mind and to find how different the scenery was there from that of his own.
William James
#73. Geniuses are commonly believed to excel other men in their power of sustained attention ... But it is their genius making them attentive, not their attention making geniuses of them.
William James
#74. There is a law in psychology that if you form a picture in your mind of what you would like to be, and you keep and hold that picture there long enough, you will soon become exactly as you have been thinking.
William James
#75. Why should we think upon things that are lovely? Because thinking determines life. It is a common habit to blame life upon the environment. Environment modifies life but does not govern life. The soul is stronger than its surroundings.
William James
#76. To change one's life: Begin now. Be bold. No exceptions.
William James
#77. Science as such assuredly has no authority, for she can only say what is, not what is not.
William James
#78. Organization and method mean much, but contagious human characters mean more in a university.
William James
#79. My first paid role was my first job out of drama school, which was 'Just William.' It was a BBC TV show. I played Ethel.
Lily James
#80. Human beings are born into this little span of life of which the best thing is its friendships and intimacies ... and yet they leave their friendships and intimacies with no cultivation, to grow as they will by the roadside, expecting them to "keep" by force of mere inertia.
William James
#81. We must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, and as carefully guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous.
William James
#82. The ultimate test of what a truth means is the conduct it dictates or inspires.
William James
#83. Ninety-nine hundredths or, possibly, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths of our activity is purely automatic and habitual, from our rising in the morning to our lying down each night.
William James
#84. To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced.
William James
#85. The perfect stillness of the night was thrilled by a more solemn silence. The darkness held a presence that was all the more felt because it was not seen. I could not any more have doubted that HE was there than that I was. Indeed, I felt myself to be, if possible, the less real of the two.
William James
#86. Our ideas must agree with realities, be such realities concrete or abstract
William James
#87. 'What would be better for us to believe!' This sounds very like a definition of truth
William James
#88. Religious experience, as we have studied it, cannot be cited as unequivocally supporting the infinitist belief. The only thingthat it unequivocally testifies to is that we can experience union with something larger than ourselves and in that union find our greatest peace.
William James
#89. Religious fermentation is always a symptom of the intellectual vigor of a society; and it is only when they forget that they are hypotheses and put on rationalistic and authoritative pretensions, that our faiths do harm.
William James
#90. It is astonishing how many mental operations we can explain when we have once grasped the principles of association
William James
#91. The god whom science recognizes must be a God of universal laws exclusively, a God who does a wholesale, not a retail business. He cannot accommodate his processes to the convenience of individuals.
William James
#93. I am 'sort of' haunted by the conviction that the divine William is the biggest and most successful fraud ever practiced on a patient world.
Henry James
#94. Man, biologically considered ... is simply the most formidable of all beasts of prey, and, indeed, the only one that preys systematically on its own kind.
William James
#95. Articulate reasons are cogent for us only when our inarticulate feelings of reality have already been impressed in favor of the same conclusion.
William James
#97. Pessimism leads to weakness, optimism to power.
William James
#98. 'Facts' are the bounds of human knowledge, set for it, not by it.
William James
#99. Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things. In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf.
William James
#100. It makes a tremendous emotional and practical difference to one whether one accepts the universe in the drab discolored way of stoic resignation to necessity, or with the passionate happiness of Christian saints.
William James
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