William James Quotes

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.

It is your friends who make your world.

A difference which makes no difference is no difference at all.

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.

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.

Unfortunately, only a small number of patients with peptic ulcer are financially able to make a pet of an ulcer.

We are thinking beings, and we cannot exclude the intellect from participating in any of our functions.

The education of attention would be an education par excellence

In the practical use of our intellect, forgetting is as important as remembering.

Tension is a habit. Relaxing is a habit. Bad habits can be broken, good habits formed.

The whole drift of my education goes to persuade me that the world of our present consciousness is only one out of many worlds of consciousness that exist.

Tell him to live by yes and no - yes to everything good, no to everything bad.

Individuality is founded in feeling

The discovery of the power of our thoughts will prove to be the most important discovery of our time

Knowledge about life is one thing; effective occupation of a place in life, with its dynamic currents passing through your being, is another.

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.

Is life worth living? It all depends on the liver.

For I had often said that the best argument I knew for an immortal life was the existence of a man who deserved one as well as Child did.

Every man who possibly can should force himself to a holiday of a full month in a year, whether he feels like taking it or not.

Genius... means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.

I myself believe that the evidence for God lies primarily in inner personal experiences.

I am only a philosopher, and there is only one thing that a philosopher can be relied on to do, and that is, to contradict other philosophers.

The exercise of prayer, in those who habitually exert it, must be regarded by us doctors as the most adequate and normal of all the pacifiers of the mind and calmers of the nerves.

Once a decision is reached, stop worrying and start working.

The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.

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.

A new position of responsibility will usually show a man to be a far stronger creature than was supposed.

Philosophy is "an unusually stubborn attempt to think clearly.

As the art of reading (after a certain stage in one's education) isthe art of skipping, so the art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.

Man's chief difference from the brutes lies in the exuberant excess of his subjective propensities. Prune his extravagance, sober him, and you undo him.

Genius is the capacity for seeing relationships where lesser men see none.

Success or failure depends more upon attitude than upon capacity.

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.

Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day.

The love of life, at any and every level of development, is the religious impulse.

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

True is the name for whatever idea starts the verification process, useful is the name for its completed function in experience

Agisci come se quel che fai, facesse la differenza. La fa!

It is wrong always, everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.

It is art that makes life, and I know of no substitute whatsoever for the force and beauty of its process.

Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. Our fires are damped, our drafts are checked. We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources.

We need only in cold blood to act as if the thing in question were real and it will infallibly end by growing into such a connection with our life that it will become real.

The prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers.

Our ideas must agree with realities, be such realities concrete or abstract, be they facts or be they principles, under penalty of endless inconsistency and frustration.

Our faith is faith in someone else's faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case.

What every genuine philosopher (every genuine man, in fact) craves most is praise although the philosophers generally call it recognition!

My experience is what I agree to attend to.

How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure.

To give up pretensions is as blessed a relief as to get them ratified.

Need and struggle are what excite and inspire us; our hour of triumph is what brings the void.