Quotes: William James

William James quotes (showing 1-30 of 158)


“The art of being wise is knowing what to overlook.”
― William James
tags: wisdom




“Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action. ”
― William James
tags: action, happiness, motivational, work




“The greatest discovery of any generation is that a human can alter his life by altering his attitude.”
― William James





William James quotes (showing 1-30 of 158)



“The art of being wise is knowing what to overlook.”
― William James
tags: wisdom






“Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action. ”
― William James
tags: action, happiness, motivational, work




“The greatest discovery of any generation is that a human can alter his life by altering his attitude.”
― William James
tags: inspirational





“Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.”
― William James
tags: actions, attributed, change



“To change one’s life:
1. Start immediately.
2. Do it flamboyantly.
3. No exceptions.”
― William James
tags: change





“A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.”
― William James
tags: attributed, wisdom



“The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.”
― William James



“Whenever you're 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






“Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.”
― William James, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy
tags: inspirational



“If you can change your mind, you can change your life.”
― William James




“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




“The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.”
― William James






“Seek out that particular mental attribute which makes you feel most deeply and vitally alive, along with which comes the inner voice which says, 'This is the real me,' and when you have found that attitude, follow it.”
― William James
tags: daring, growth, soul




“Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.”
― William James





“We don’t laugh because we’re happy, we’re happy because we laugh.”
― William James




“Human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.”
― William James




“The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.”
― William James





“I am done with great things and big things, great institutions and big success, and I am for those tiny, invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, yet which if you give them time, will rend the hardest monuments of man's pride.”
― William James



“Anything you may hold firmly in your imagination can be yours.”
― William James



“To change one's life: 1. Start immediately, 2. Do it flamboyantly, 3. No exceptions.”
― William James
tags: inspirational-quotes




“Begin to be now what you will be hereafter. ”
― William James


“Wherever you are, it is your friends who make your world.”
― William James



“Science, like life, feeds on its own decay. New facts burst old rules; then newly divined conceptions bind old and new together into a reconciling law.”
― William James, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy
tags: science




“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




“If merely 'feeling good' could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.”
― William James
tags: faith, religion





“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
tags: friendship




“Our view of the world is truly shaped by what we decide to hear.”
― William James




“There are no differences but differences of degree between different degrees of difference and no difference.”
― William James
tags: ambien, hallucinogenic-drugs, mysticism, nitrous-oxide, paranormal





“Good-humor is a philosophic state of mind; it seems to say to Nature that we take her no more seriously than she takes us. I maintain that one should always talk of philosophy with a smile.”
― William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
tags: humor, philosophy




“Beyond the very extreme of fatigue and distress, we may find amounts of ease and power we never dreamed ourselves to own; sources of strength never taxed at all because we never push through the obstruction”
― William James



William James quotes (showing 31-60 of 158)




“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




“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, The Varieties of Religious Experience




“The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS. That - with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word 'success' - is our national disease.
”
― William James




“Procrastination is attitude's natural assassin. There's nothing so fatiguing as an uncompleted task”
― William James





“The aim of a college education is to teach you to know a good man when you see one.”
― William James





“A great nation is not saved by wars, it is saved by acts without external picturesqueness; by speaking, writing, voting reasonably; by smiting corruption swiftly; by good temper between parties; by the people knowing true men when they see them, and preferring them as leaders to rabid partisans and empty quacks.”
― William James





“Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.”
― William James, The Writings of William James




“I am no lover of disorder and doubt as such. Rather I fear to lose truth by the pretension to possess it already wholly.”
― William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience




“...do every day or two something for no other reason that 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, Habit







“If any organism fails to fulfill its potentialities, it becomes sick.”
― William James
tags: sickness





“My experience is what I agree to attend to.”
― William James
tags: consciousness





“We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise anyone who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. If he does not join the general scramble and pant with the money-making street, we deem him spiritless and lacking in ambition”
― William James






“If you believe that feeling bad or worrying long enough will change a past or future event, then you are residing on another planet with a different reality system.”
― William James





“This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it.”
― William James
tags: life





“Religion is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism.”
― William James





“See the exquisite contrast of the types of mind! The pragmatist clings to facts and concreteness, observes truth at its work in particular cases, and generalises. Truth, for him, becomes a class-name for all sorts of definite working-values in experience. For the rationalist it remains a pure abstraction, to the bare name of which we must defer. When the pragmatist undertakes to show in detail just why we must defer, the rationalist is unable to recognise the concretes from which his own abstraction is taken. He accuses us of denying truth; whereas we have only sought to trace exactly why people follow it and always ought to follow it. Your typical ultra-abstractions fairly shudders at concreteness: other things equal, he positively prefers the pale and spectral. If the two universes were offered, he would always choose the skinny outline rather than the rich thicket of reality. It is so much purer, clearer, nobler.”
― William James, Pragmatism and Other Writings
tags: idealism, philosophy, pragmatism, rationalism, truth




“Actions seems to follow feeling, but really actions and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not. Thus the sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there.”
― William James



“Pragmatism asks its usual question. "Grant an idea or belief to be true," it says, "what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone's actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth's cash-value in experiential terms?”
― William James
tags: experiential, philosophy, pragmatism




“Philosophy is "an unusually stubborn attempt to think clearly.”
― William James



“A man with no philosophy in him is the most inauspicious and unprofitable of all possible social mates.”
― William James




“It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all.”
― William James
tags: inspiration





“The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal.”
― William James



“[There are, in us] possibilities that take our breath away, and show a world wider than either physics or philistine ethics can imagine. Here is a world in which all is well, in spite of certain forms of death, death of hope, death of strength, death of responsibility, of fear and wrong, death of everything that paganism, naturalism and legalism pin their trust on.”
― William James



“I dont sing cause im happy I'm happy cause I sing”
― William James



“Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.”
― William James



“There are two lives, the natural and the spiritual, and we must lose the one before we can participate in the other.”
― William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience




“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
tags: attitude, strength





“Belief creates the actual fact.”
― William James
tags: faith



“The prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers. ”
― William James




“Most people, probably, are in doubt about certain matters ascribed to their past. They may have seen them, may have said them, done them, or they may only have dreamed or imagined they did so.”
― William James











William James quotes (showing 61-90 of 158)



“The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual; the impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.”
― William James




“Damn the Absolute!”
― William James



“I don't sing because I'm happy. I'm happy because I sing.”
― William James



“If this life is not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight.”
― William James





“The strenuous life tastes better”
― William James





“It does not follow, because our ancestors made so many errors of fact and mixed them with their religion, that we should therefore leave off being religious at all. By being religious we establish ourselves in possession of ultimate reality at the only points at which reality is given us to guard. Our responsible concern is with our private destiny, after all.”
― William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience



“As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use.”
― William James





“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
tags: reality




“To change one's life: Start immediately. Do it flamboyantly. No exceptions.”
― William James
tags: life




“I am tired of the position of the dried-up critic and doubter. The believer is the true full man.
(from a biography of James by Robert D. Richardson)”
― William James





“When you have to make a choice and don't make it, that is in itself a choice.”
― William James





“When all is said and done, we are in the end absolutely dependent on the universe; and into sacrifices and surrenders of some sort, deliberately looked at and accepted, we are drawn and pressed as into our only permanent positions of repose. Now in those states of mind which fall short of religion, the surrender is submitted to as an imposition of necessity, and the sacrifice is undergone at the very best without complaint. In the religious life, on the contrary, surrender and sacrifice are positively espoused: even unnecessary givings-up are added in order that the happiness may increase. Religion thus makes easy and felicitous what in any case is necessary.”
― William James




“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




“Our colleges ought to have lit up in us a lasting relish for a better kind of man, a loss of appetite for mediocrities.”
― William James






“Selection is the very keel on which our mental ship is built. And in this case of memory its utility is obvious.   If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing.”
― William James
tags: psychology




“we have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood”
― William James
tags: belief, ignorance, knowledge, wisdom





“the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess sucess is our national disease”
― William James
tags: philosophy





“There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied upon to do, and that is to contradict other philosophers.”
― William James





“The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes.”
― William James




“What do believers in the Absolute mean by saving that their belief affords them comfort? They mean that since in the Absolute finite evil is ‘overruled’ already, we may, therefore, whenever we wish, treat the temporal as if it were potentially the eternal, be sure that we can trust its outcome, and, without sin, dismiss our fear and drop the worry of our finite responsibility. In short, they mean that we have a right ever and anon to take a moral holiday, to let the world wag in its own way, feeling that its issues are in better hands than ours and are none of our business.”
― William James
tags: pragmatism





“Whilst part of what we perceive comes through our senses from the object before us, another part (and it may be the larger part) always comes out of our own mind.”
― William James, The Principles of Psychology





“Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.”
― William James
tags: inspirational-quotes





“When a thing is new, people say: ‘It is not true.’ Later, when its truth becomes obvious, they say: ‘It is not important.’ Finally, when its importance cannot be denied, they say: ‘Anyway, it is not new.”
― William James





“The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.”
― William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience





“So you see that the process of education, taken in a large way, may be described as nothing but the process of acquiring ideas or conceptions, the best educated mind being the mind which has the largest stock of them, ready to meet the largest possible variety of the emergencies of life. The lack of education means only the failure to have acquired them, and the consequent liability to be 'floored' and 'rattled' in the vicissitudes of experience.”
― William James
tags: conceptions, education, ideas



“Round about the accredited and orderly facts of every science there ever floats a sort of dust-cloud of exceptional observations, of occurrences minute and irregular and seldom met with, which it always proves more easy to ignore than to attend to... Anyone will renovate his science who will steadily look after the irregular phenomena, and when science is renewed, its new formulas often have more of the voice of the exceptions in them than of what were supposed to be the rules.”
― William James
tags: science





“To change one's life: Start immediately. Do it flamboyantly. No exceptions.”
― William James
tags: inspirational, life







“But it is the bane of psychology to suppose that where results are similar, processes must be the same. Psychologists are too apt to reason as geometers would, if the latter were to say that the diameter of a circle is the same thing as its semi-circumference, because, forsooth, they terminate in the same two points.”
― William James, The Principles of Psychology Vol 1
tags: psychology, reason, theory




“If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, you mustn't seek to show that no crows are; it is enough if you prove one single crow to be white.”
― William James









William James quotes (showing 91-120 of 158)



“Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life. Each lapse is like the letting fall of a ball of string which one is carefully winding up; a single slip undoes more than a great many turns will wind again.”
― William James, The Principles of Psychology Vol 1




“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, The Varieties of Religious Experience





“My thinking is first and last and always for the sake of my doing.”
― William James




“Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not.”
― William James
tags: action, feeling




“Now, my dear little girl, you have come to an age when the inward life develops and when some people (and on the whole those who have most of a destiny) find that all is not a bed of roses. Among other things there will be waves of terrible sadness, which last sometimes for days; irritation, insensibility, etc., etc., which taken together form a melancholy. Now, painful as it is, this is sent to us for an enlightenment. It always passes off, and we learn about life from it, and we ought to learn a great many good things if we react on it right. (For instance, you learn how good a thing your home is, and your country, and your brothers, and you may learn to be more considerate of other people, who, you now learn, may have their inner weaknesses and sufferings, too.) Many persons take a kind of sickly delight in hugging it; and some sentimental ones may even be proud of it, as showing a fine sorrowful kind of sensibility. Such persons make a regular habit of the luxury of woe. That is the worst possible reaction on it. It is usually a sort of disease, when we get it strong, arising from the organism having generated some poison in the blood; and we mustn't submit to it an hour longer than we can help, but jump at every chance to attend to anything cheerful or comic or take part in anything active that will divert us from our mean, pining inward state of feeling.

When it passes off, as I said, we know more than we did before. And we must try to make it last as short as time as possible. The worst of it often is that, while we are in it, we don't want to get out of it. We hate it, and yet we prefer staying in it—that is a part of the disease. If we find ourselves like that, we must make something ourselves to some hard work, make ourselves sweat, etc.; and that is the good way of reacting that makes of us a valuable character. The disease makes you think of yourself all the time; and the way out of it is to keep as busy as we can thinking of things and of other people—no matter what's the matter with our self.”
― William James
tags: depression, habits





“Philosophy, beginning in wonder, as Plato and Aristotle said, is able to fancy everything different from what it is. It sees the familiar as if it were strange, and the strange as if it were familiar. It can take things up and lay them down again. It rouses us from our native dogmatic slumber and breaks up our caked prejudices.”
― William James, Some Problems of Philosophy: A Beginning of an Introduction to Philosophy






“But psychology is passing into a less simple phase. Within a few years what one may call a microscopic psychology has arisen in Germany, carried on by experimental methods, asking of course every moment for introspective data, but eliminating their uncertainty by operating on a large scale and taking statistical means. This method taxes patience to the utmost, and could hardly have arisen in a country whose natives could be bored.

Such Germans as Weber, Fechner, Vierordt, and Wundt obviously cannot ; and their success has brought into the field an array of younger experimental psychologists, bent on studying the elements of the mental life, dissecting them out from the gross results in which they are embedded, and as far as possible reducing them to quantitative scales.

The simple and open method of attack having done what it can, the method of patience, starving out, and harassing to death is tried ; the Mind must submit to a regular siege, in which minute advantages gained night and day by the forces that hem her in must sum themselves up at last into her overthrow. There is little of the grand style about these new prism, pendulum, and chronograph-philosophers. They mean business, not chivalry.

What generous divination, and that superiority in virtue which was thought by Cicero to give a man the best insight into nature, have failed to do, their spying and scraping, their deadly tenacity and almost diabolic cunning, will doubtless some day bring about.

No general description of the methods of experimental psychology would be instructive to one unfamiliar with the instances of their application, so we will waste no words upon the attempt.”
― William James, The Principles of Psychology Vol 1
tags: blame-the-germans, experimental-psychology, lol, political-incorrectness, quaint




“Seize the very first possible opportunity to act on every resolution you make, and on every emotional prompting you may experience in the direction of the habits you aspire to gain”
― William James



“Wisdom is seeing something in a non-habitual manner.”
― William James
tags: philosophy


“How soon, indeed, are human things forgotten! As we meet here this morning, the Southern sun is shining on their place of burial, and the waves sparkling and the sea-gulls circling around Fort Wagner's ancient site. But the great earthworks and their thundering cannon, the commanders and their followers, the wild assault and repulse that for a brief space made night hideous on that far-off evening, have all sunk into the blue gulf of the past, and for the majority of this generation are hardly more than an abstract name, a picture, a tale that is told. Only when some yellow-bleached photograph of a soldier of the 'sixties comes into our hands, with that odd and vivid look of individuality due to the moment when it was taken, do we realize the concreteness of that by-gone history, and feel how interminable to the actors in them were those leaden-footed hours and years.”
― William James



“Earnestness means willingness to live with energy, though energy bring pain. The pain may be pain to other people or pain to one's self — it makes little difference; for when the strenuous mood is on one, the aim is to break something, no matter whose or what. Nothing annihilates an inhibition as irresistibly as anger does it; for, as Moltke says of war, destruction pure and simple is its essence. This is what makes it so invaluable an ally of every other passion. The sweetest delights are trampled on with a ferocious pleasure the moment they offer themselves as checks to a cause by which our higher indignations are elicited. It costs then nothing to drop friendships, to renounce long-rooted privileges and possessions, to break with social ties. Rather do we take a stern joy in the astringency and desolation; and what is called weakness of character seems in most cases to consist of the inaptitude for these sacrificial moods, of which one's own inferior self and its pet softnesses must often be the targets and the victims.”
― William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
tags: anger, earnestness






“This sadness lies at the heart of every merely positivistic, agnostic, or naturalistic scheme of philosophy. Let sanguine healthy-mindedness do its best with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and forgetting, still the evil background is really there to be thought of, and the skull will grin in at the banquet. In the practical life of the individual, we know how his whole gloom or glee about any present fact depends on the remoter schemes and hopes with which it stands related. Its significance and framing give it the chief part of its value. Let it be known to lead nowhere, and however agreeable it may be in its immediacy, its glow and gilding vanish. The old man, sick with an insidious internal disease, may laugh and quaff his wine at first as well as ever, but he knows his fate now, for the doctors have revealed it; and the knowledge knocks the satisfaction out of all these functions. They are partners of death and the worm is their brother, and they turn to a mere flatness.”
― William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
tags: william-james



“Why may we not be in the universe, as our dogs and cats are in our drawing rooms and libraries?”
― William James, The Correspondence of William James: 1885-1889
tags: consciousness, perception, reality






“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, A Pluralistic Universe
tags: abstraction, intellect, spirituality



“To suggest personal will and effort to one all sicklied o'er with the sense of irremediable impotence is to suggest the most impossible of things. What he craves is to be consoled in his very powerlessness, to feel that the spirit of the universe recognizes and secures him, all decaying and failing as he is.”
― William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience




“A stream of ideal tendency embedded in the external structure of the world.” WJ., p. 554.”
― William James



“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, Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals
tags: imitation, invention



“The means have murdered the end.”
― William James
tags: life



“We forget that every good that is worth possessing must be paid for in strokes of daily effort. We postpone and postpone until those smiling possibilities are dead... By neglecting the necessary concrete labor, by sparing ourselves the little daily tax, we are positively digging the graves of our higher possibilities.”
― William James



“our experience is what we attend to”
― William James



“Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly. The fundamental conceptions of psychology are practically very clear to us, but theoretically they are very confused, and one easily makes the obscurest assumptions in this science without realizing, until challenged, what internal difficulties they involve.”
― William James, The Principles of Psychology Vol 1
tags: metaphysics, philosophy, psychology, science, truth




“The greatest revolution of our generation is the discovery that human beings by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives”
― William James




“Whatever is beyond this narrow rational consciousness we mistake for our only consciousness.”
― William James





“We ought to say a feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by, quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue or a feeling of cold.”
― William James



“All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits.”
― William James
tags: habit



“If we knew thoroughly the nervous system of Shakespeare . . . we should be able to show why . . . his hand came to trace on certain sheets of paper those crabbed little black marks which we . . . call the manuscript of Hamlet. We should understand the rationale of every erasure and alteration therein . . . without in the slightest degree acknowledging the existence of the thoughts in Shakespeare’s mind. The words and sentences would be taken, not as signs of anything beyond themselves, but as little outward facts, pure and simple.”
― William James, The Principles of Psychology Vol 1



“If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, you musn't seek to show that no crows are; it is enough if you prove one single crow to be white.”
― William James
tags: insperational




“Were one asked to characterize the life of religion in the broadest and most general terms possible, one might say that it consists of the belief that there is an unseen order, and our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.”
― William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience



“Human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds,
can change the outer aspects of their lives. ”
― William James
tags: life, william-james



William James quotes (showing 121-150 of 158)


“However inadequate our ideas of causal efficacy may be, we are less wide of the mark when we say that our ideas and feelings have it, than the Automatists are when they say they haven’t it. As in the night all cats are gray, so in the darkness of metaphysical criticism all causes are obscure. But one has no right to pull the pall over the psychic half of the subject only . . . whilst in the same breath one dogmatizes about material causation as if Hume, Kant, and Lotze had never been born.”
― William James, The Principles of Psychology Vol 1


“Your hopes, dreams and aspirations are legitimate. They are trying to take you airborne, above the clouds, above the storms, if you only let them.”
― William James
tags: inspirational, motivational



“...the faith state...is the psychic correlate of a biological growth reducing contending-desires to one direction... [p.272]”
― William James






“...our moral and practical attitude....impulses, inhibitions.... how it contains and moulds us by its restrictive pressure almost as if we were fluids pent with the cavity of a jar.... It becomes our subconscious. [p. 287]”
― William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience





“To the broody hen the notion would probably seem monstrous that there should be a creature in the world to whom a nestful of eggs was not utterly fascinating and precious and never-to-be-too-much-sat-upon object which it is to her.”
― William James



“Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation.”
― William James
tags: beyond-words, fact, philosophy, truth, truths



“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
tags: cognitive-dissonance



“A sense of humor is just common sense dancing.”
― William James
tags: common-sense, sense-of-humor



“I saw a moving sight the other morning before breakfast in a little hotel where I slept in the dusty fields. The young man of the house shot a little wolf called coyote in the early morning. The little heroic animal lay on the ground, with his big furry ears, and his clean white teeth, and his little cheerful body, but his little brave life was gone. It made me think how brave all living things are. Here little coyote was, without any clothes or house or books or anything, with nothing to pay his way with, and risking his life so cheerfully — and losing it — just to see if he could pick up a meal near the hotel. He was doing his coyote-business like a hero, and you must do your boy-business, and I my man-business bravely, too, or else we won't be worth as much as a little coyote.

- to his young son from the Yosemite Valley on (1989-08-28)”
― William James
tags: wisdom-for-scrappers




“Vjeruj da život vrijedi živjeti, a tvoja će ti vjera to i dokazati.”
― William James




“We know the meaning so long as no one asks us to define it.”
― William James
tags: definition, meaning, psychology, william-james





“Psychology is the science of mental life”
― William James




“The first thing the intellect does with an object is to class it along with something else. But any object that is infinitely important to us and awakens our devotion feels to us also as if it must be sui generis and unique. Probably a crab would be filled with a sense of personal outrage if it could hear us class it without ado or apology as a crustacean, and thus dispose of it. "I am no such thing," it would say; "I am MYSELF, MYSELF alone.”
― William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience




“To change your life: start immediately; do it flamboyantly; no exceptions.”
― William James



“I don't sing because I'm happy; I'm happy because I sing.”
― William James



“The opposition between the men who have and the men who are is immemorial.”
― William James



“The greatest revolution of our time is the discovery that human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.”
― William James
tags: inner-attitudes



“There is something almost shocking in the notion of so chaste a function carrying this Kantian hurlyburly in her womb.”
― William James, The Principles of Psychology Vol 1
tags: hilarity, philosophy, psychology





“In order to disprove the assertion that all crows are black, one white crow is sufficient.”
― William James
tags: harvard-professor-of-psychology, proof, religion, science, spirituality, theory




“It is only by risking ourselves from one minute to the another that we live at all.”
― William James




“An outree explanation, violating all our preconceptions, would never pass for a true account of a novelty. We should scratch round industriously till we found something less excentric.”
― William James, Pragmatism and Other Writings
tags: pragmatism, psychology, truth, w-v-o-quine, web-of-belief



“It's turtles all the way down.”
― William James



“I fear to lose truth by the pretension to possess it already wholly.”
― William James



“The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour.”
― William James





“Thus, when a superior intellect and a psychopathic temperament coalesce...in the same individual, we have the best possible conditions for the kind of effective genius that gets into the biographical dictionaries. Such men do not remain mere critics and understanders with their intellect. Their ideas posses them, they inflict them, for better or worse, upon their companions or their age.”
― William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience



“In its broadest term, religion says that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in rightful relations to it.”
― William James
tags: religion, spirituality



“Where [God] is, tragedy is only provisional and partial, and shipwreck and dissolution are not the absolutely final things.”
― William James





“a man does not cry because he is sad, he is sad because he cries”
― William James



“If you can change your mind you can change the world!”
― William James




“A man has as many social selves as there are distinct groups of persons about whose opinion he cares. He generally shows a different side of himself to each of these different groups.”
― William James




“We must know the truth; and we must avoid error,--these are our first and great commandments as would-be knowers; but they are not two ways of stating an identical commandment, they are two separable laws. Although it may indeed happen that when we believe the truth A, we escape as an incidental consequence from believing the falsehood B, it hardly ever happens that by merely disbelieving B we necessarily believe A. We may in escaping B fall into believing other falsehoods, C or D, just as bad as B; or we may escape B by not believing anything at all, not even A.”
― William James, The Will to Believe



“The best use of life is to spend it for something that outlasts it.”
― William James




“The pragmatic method starts from the postulate that there is no difference of truth that doesn’t make a difference of fact somewhere; and it seeks to determine the meaning of all differences of opinion by making the discussion hinge as soon as possible upon some practical or particular issue.”
― William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism


“The deepest craving of human nature is the need to be appreciated.”
― William James



“If the generations of mankind suffered and laid down their lives; if martyrs sang in the fire... for no other end than that a race of creatures of such unexampled insipidity should succeed, and protract... their contented and inoffensive lives, why, at such a rate... better ring down the curtain before the last act of the play, so that a business that began so importantly may be saved from so singularly flat a winding up.”
― William James


“When once a decision is reached and execution is the order of the day, dismiss absolutely all responsibility and care about the outcome.”
― William James


“Contempt for one's own comrades, for the troops of the enemy, and, above all, fierce contempt for one's own person, are what war demands of everyone. Far better is it for an army to be too savage, too cruel, too barbarous, than to possess too much sentimentality and human reasonableness.”
― William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience



“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.”
― William James