William James Quotes
An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible.
So it is with children who learn to read fluently and well: They begin to take flight into whole new worlds as effortlessly as young birds take to the sky.
It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.
There is an organic affinity between joyousness and tenderness, and their companionship in the saintly life need in no way occasion surprise.
The 'I think' which Kant said must be able to accompany all my objects, is the 'I breathe' which actually does accompany them.
To be conscious means not simply to be, but to be reported, known, to have awareness of one's being added to that being.
Those thoughts are truth which guide us to beneficial interaction with sensible particulars as they occur, whether they copy these in advance or not.
Our acts of voluntary attending, as brief and fitful as they are, are nevertheless momentous and critical, determining us, as they do, to higher or lower destinies.
Need and struggle are what excite and inspire us; our hour of triumph is what brings the void.
The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons.
A new idea is first condemned as ridiculous and then dismissed as trivial, until finally, it becomes what everybody knows.
Why may we not be in the universe, as our dogs and cats are in our drawingrooms and libraries?
Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs pass, so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them.
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.
In order to disprove the assertion that all crows are black, one white crow is sufficient.
The examining physician often hesitates to make the necessary examination because it involves soiling the finger.
The first thing to learn in intercourse with others is non-interference with their own particular ways of being happy, provided those ways do not assume to interfere by violence with ours.
Seek out that particular mental attribute which makes you feel most deeply and vitally alive.
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.
Man lives by habits indeed, but what he lives for is thrill and excitements. ... From time immemorial war has been ... the supremely thrilling excitement.
The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments.
Democracy is still upon its trial. The civic genius of our people is its only bulwark.
I am no lover of disorder and doubt as such. Rather do I fear to lose truth by this pretension to possess it already wholly.
Experience, as we know, has a way of boiling over, and making us correct our present formulas.
You must bring out of each word its practical cash-value, set it at work within the stream of your experience.
'Pure experience' is the name I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories.
Religious awe is the same organic thrill which we feel in a forest at twilight, or in a mountain gorge.