Top 100 William James Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. If volition is bound to social imperatives, as William James believed, and it's therefore easier to go to war than it is to quit smoking, one could say that Liz Norton was a woman who found it easier to quit smoking than to go to war.
Roberto Bolano
#5. Always make the other person feel important. John Dewey, as we have already noted, said that the desire to be important is the deepest urge in human nature; and William James said: The
Dale Carnegie
#6. William James described success as a combination of two things. An inner ideal which is followed persistently with courage and Outer achievement related to that ideal.
Jim Rohn
#7. William James tells us that we cannot instantly change our emotions just by "making
up our minds to"-but that we can change our actions. And that when we change our actions, we will
automatically change our feelings.
Dale Carnegie
#9. I am also greatly indebted to Bergson, William James, and John Dewey. One of my preoccupations has been to rescue their type of thought from the charge of anti-intellectualism, which rightly or wrongly has been associated with it.
Alfred North Whitehead
#10. This insistence on "having his say upon the universe" is the profoundest motive of William James thinking as well as of his filial gratitude.
Ralph Barton Perry
#11. WHEN YOU ARE IN CONFLICT WITH SOMEONE, THERE IS ONE FACTOR THAT CAN MAKE THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN DAMAGING YOUR RELATIONSHIP AND DEEPENING IT. THAT FACTOR IS ATTITUDE. - William James
Jack Canfield
#12. Our great American philosopher William James has said - "We have as many personalities as there are people who know us." To which I would add "We have no personalities unless there are people who know us. Unless there are people we hope to convince that we deserve to exist.
Joyce Carol Oates
#13. The essence of education is, in the words of William James, to teach a person what deserves to be valued, to impart ideals as well as knowledge, to cultivate in students the ability to distinguish the true and good from their counterfeits and the wisdom to prefer the former to the latter.
William J. Bennett
#14. William James said, 'We don't laugh because we are happy. We are happy because we laugh.
Robin S. Sharma
#15. Harvard University psychologist William James summed it up beautifully. 'The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.' This
Ashwin Sanghi
#16. Psychologist William James said that possibly the deepest human need is the need to feel appreciated.
Gary Chapman
#17. Your mind is like Heraclitus' river. Your mind, in fact, is like nineteenth-century father of psychology William James' "stream of consciousness," a bubbling, babbling brook. Your mind constantly produces different currents of associations, different swirls of thought, and different moods.
Howard Bloom
#18. William James was not a prophet. He was a philosopher whose philosophy reflected his profound humanity.
Stanley Hauerwas
#19. When he died, Emerson was thought of as the representative American writer par excellence, and his point of view was still so potent that William James was honored to be asked to speak at a centenary celebration.
Howard Mumford Jones
#20. Be not afraid of life. Believe that it is worth living, and your belief will help create that fact. William James The
Robin S. Sharma
#21. William James said, The best use of life is to spend it for something that outlasts it.
Rick Warren
#22. I think it's a misreading of Dostoevsky to think of him as a programmatic theist. He's actually much closer to someone like William James. He's actually a pragmatist.
Will Self
#23. All our life, 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. - William James
Charles Duhigg
#24. Recollect that only when habits of order are formed can we advance to really interesting fields of action - and consequently accumulate grain on grain of willful choice like a very miser - never forgetting how one link dropped undone and indefinite number. - William James
Mason Currey
#25. William James, who believed the decisive thing about us was not intelligence, strength, or wealth. The real question posed to us is the effort we are willing to make,
George Sheehan
#26. As William James observed, we must reflect that, when we reach the end of our days, our life experience will equal what we have paid attention to, whether by choice or default. We are at risk, without quite fully realizing it, of living lives that are less our own than we imagine.
Tim Wu
#27. The mind does not regulate its own condition. Mental depression, for example, is a state caused by the body ... William James described this relationship when he said we become sad because we shed tears: we do not shed tears because we are sad.
Jack Henry Abbott
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. Both thought and feeling are determinants of conduct, and the same conduct may be determined either by feeling or by thought.
William James
#35. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. Not through mere perversity do men run after it.
William James
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. We all have reservoirs of life to draw upon, of which we do not dream.
William James
#41. the Christian who seems to be so overmatched, is yet so unconquerable, II Cor. 12:9; James 5:11.
William Gurnall
#42. But facts are facts, and if we only get enough of them theyare sure to combine.
William James
#43. Unfortunately, only a small number of patients with peptic ulcer are financially able to make a pet of an ulcer.
William James Mayo
#44. No reception without reaction, no impression without correlative expression, -this is the great maxim which the teacher ought never to forget.
William James
#45. 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
#46. To consider hypotheses is surely always better than to dogmatize ins blaue hinein
William James
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. Despair lames most people, but it wakes others fully up.
William James
#50. Most men have a good memory for facts connected with their own pursuits.
William James
#51. A stream of ideal tendency embedded in the external structure of the world.
William James
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 'Facts' are the bounds of human knowledge, set for it, not by it.
William James
#55. Pessimism leads to weakness, optimism to power.
William James
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. 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
#61. 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
#62. It is astonishing how many mental operations we can explain when we have once grasped the principles of association
William James
#63. To change one's life: Begin now. Be bold. No exceptions.
William James
#64. 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
#65. 'What would be better for us to believe!' This sounds very like a definition of truth
William James
#66. Our ideas must agree with realities, be such realities concrete or abstract
William James
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. The ultimate test of what a truth means is the conduct it dictates or inspires.
William James
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. Organization and method mean much, but contagious human characters mean more in a university.
William James
#75. Science as such assuredly has no authority, for she can only say what is, not what is not.
William James
#76. When you have to make a choice and don't make it, that is in itself a choice.
William James
#77. An acre of performance is worth the whole Land of promise
James Howell
#78. 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
#79. Individuality outruns all classification, yet we insist on classifying every one we meet under some general head.
William James
#80. Most people never run far enough on their first wind to find out they've got a second.
William James
#81. 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
#82. Is life worth living? It all depends on the liver.
William James
#83. 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
#84. All religions and spiritual traditions begin with the cry Help!
William James
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. The ideas gained by men before they are twenty-five are practically the only ideas they shall have in their lives.
William James
#89. David McKay, 1900. Wolfe, Thomas. Look Homeward, Angel. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1929. Yeats, William Butler. A Vision
James Hollis
#90. 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
#91. (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
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. Most unhappiness is caused because people listen to themselves ... instead of talking to themselves.
William James
#95. 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
#96. The deepest hunger in human beings is the desire to be appreciated.
William James
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. Psychology ought certainly to give the teacher radical help.
William James
#100. The teachers of this country, one may say, have its future in their hands.
William James
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