William James Quotes

Considering the inner fitness of things, one would rather think that the very first act of a will endowed with freedom should be to sustain the belief in the freedom itself.

... A rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those ... truths were really there, would be an irrational rule.

There is but one indefectibly certain truth , and that is the truth that pyrrhonistic scepticism itself leaves standing, the truth that the present phenomenon of consciousness exists.

Psychology is a science, and teaching is an art; and sciences never generate arts directly out of themselves.

To be a real philosopher all that is necessary is to hate some one else's type of thinking.

You do not sing because you're happy, you're happy because you sing.

Both thought and feeling are determinants of conduct, and the same conduct may be determined either by feeling or by thought.

To know psychology, therefore, is absolutely no guarantee that we shall be good teacher.

The teachers of this country, one may say, have its future in their hands.

The most peculiar social self which one is apt to have is in the mind of the person one is in love with.

Men are now proud of belonging to a conquering nation, and without a murmur they lay down their persons and their wealth, if by so doing they may fend off subjection.

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.

I don't see how an epigram, being a bolt from the blue, with no introduction or cue, ever gets itself writ.

The highest flights of charity, devotion, trust, patience, bravery to which the wings of human nature have spread themselves, have been flown for religious ideals.

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.

When you have broken the reality into concepts you never can reconstruct it in its wholeness.

Since belief is measured by action, he who forbids us to believe religion to be true, necessarily also forbids us to act as we should if we did believe it to be true.

... no bell in us tolls to let us know for certain when truth is in our grasp.

True ideas lead us into useful verbal and conceptual quarters as well as directly up to useful sensible termini. They lead to consistency, stability and flowing human intercourse.

At bottom, the whole concern of religion is with the manner of our acceptance of the universe.

In the matter of belief, we are all extreme conservatives.

The intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally comes.

You can't out-perform your self-image.

There can be no difference anywhere that does not make a difference somewhere.

A remarkable parallel, which I think has never been noticed, obtains between the facts of social evolution on the one hand, and of zological evolution as expounded by Mr. Darwin on the other.

No more fiendish punishment could be devised, were such a thing physically possible, than that one should be turned loose in society and remain absolutely unnoticed.

Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming.

Real culture lives by sympathies and admirations, not by dislikes and disdains; under all misleading wrappings it pounces unerringly upon the human core.

It is only the fundamental conceptions of psychology which are of real value to a teacher.

I wished by treating Psychology like a natural science, to help her become one.

I am well aware how odd it must seem to some of you to hear me say that an idea is true so long as to believe it is profitable to our lives

All natural happiness thus seems infected with a contradiction. The breath of the sepulchre surrounds it.

The worst thing that can happen to a good teacher is to get a bad conscience about her profession because she feels herself hopeless as a psychologist.

Pretend what we may, the whole man within us is at work when we form our philosophical opinions.

There is but one unconditional commandment ... to bring about the very largest total universe of good which we can see.

No reception without reaction, no impression without correlative expression, -this is the great maxim which the teacher ought never to forget.

Pluralism lets things really exist in the each-form or distributively. Monism thinks that the all-form or collective-unit form is the only form that is rational.

It would probably astound each of them beyond measure to be let into his neighbor's mind and to find how different the scenery there was from that in his own.

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)

Focus on increasing service. Becoming great where you are. Pile in the wood. The heat will follow.

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.

The greatest discovery of any generation is that a human can alter his life by altering his attitude.

Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.

Wisdom is seeing something in a non-habitual manner.

There is something almost shocking in the notion of so chaste a function carrying this Kantian hurlyburly in her womb.

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.

The art of being wise is knowing what to overlook.

we have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood

Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action.

We are like islands in the sea, separate on the surface but connected in the deep.