William James Quotes
Democracy is still upon its trial. The civic genius of our people is its only bulwark.
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.
A man with no philosophy in him is the most inauspicious and unprofitable of all possible social mates.
As a rule reading fiction is as hard to me as trying to hit a target by hurling feathers at it. I need resistance to celebrate!
Religious awe is the same organic thrill which we feel in a forest at twilight, or in a mountain gorge.
Men's activities are occupied into ways -- in grappling with external circumstances and in striving to set things at one in their own topsy-turvy mind.
Experience, as we know, has a way of boiling over, and making us correct our present formulas.
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.
Seek out that particular mental attribute which makes you feel most deeply and vitally alive.
Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is still theoretically possible ... faith is the readiness to act in a cause the prosperous issue of which is not certified to us in advance.
Where quality is the thing sought after, the thing of supreme quality is cheap, whatever the price one has to pay for it.
The more rational statement is that we feel sorry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and not that we cry, strike, or tremble because we are sorry, angry, or fearful as the case may be.
For morality life is a war, and the service of the highest is a sort of cosmic patriotism which also calls for volunteers.
The examining physician often hesitates to make the necessary examination because it involves soiling the finger.
If you give appreciation to people, you win their goodwill. But more important than that, practicing this philosophy has made a different person of me.
The total possible consciousness may be split into parts which co-exist but mutually ignore each other.
The ideas gained by men before they are twenty-five are practically the only ideas they shall have in their lives.
Owing to the fact that all experience is a process, no point of view can ever be the last one
Procrastination is attitude's natural assassin. There's nothing so fatiguing as an uncompleted task
True to her inveterate habit, rationalism reverts to 'principles,' and thinks that when an abstraction once is named, we own an oracular solution.
Life feels like a real fight - as if there were something really wild in the universe which we, with all our idealities and faithfulnesses, are needed to redeem.
We are not only gregarious animals, liking to be in sight of our fellows, but we have an innate propensity to get ourselves noticed, and noticed favorably, by our kind.
A new opinion counts as true just in proportion as it gratifies the individual's desire to assimilate the novel in his experience to his beliefs in stock
As the brain-changes are continuous, so do all these consciousnesses melt into each other like dissolving views. Properly they are but one protracted consciousness, one unbroken stream.
Our esteem for facts has not neutralized in us all religiousness. It is itself almost religious. Our scientific temper is devout.
If an unusual necessity forces us onward, a surprising thing occurs. The fatigue gets worse up to a certain point, when, gradually or suddenly, it passes away and we are fresher than before!
We and God have business with each other, and in opening ourselves to God's influence our deepest destiny is fulfilled.
