William James Quotes

Most men have a good memory for facts connected with their own pursuits.

Geniuses are commonly believed to excel other men in their power of sustained attention . . . But it is their genius making them attentive, not their attention making geniuses of them.

Every claim creates an obligation.

Truth is one species of good, and not, as is usually supposed, a category distinct from good, and co-ordinate with it

It is very important that teachers should realize the importance of habit.

[T]here is very little difference between one person and another, but what little difference ther eis, is very important.

Every sort of energy and endurance, of courage and capacity for handling life's evils, is set free in those who have religious faith.

The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion.

Religion must be considered vindicated in a certain way from the attacks of her critics.

Invention, using the term most broadly, and imitation, are the two legs, so to call them, on which the human race historically has walked.

The trail of the human serpent is thus over everything.

In the acquisition of a new habit, or the leaving off of an old one, we must take care to launch ourselves with as strong and decided an initiative as possible.

What a teacher needs to know about psychology "might almost be written on the palm of one's hand."

Work usually follows will.

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.

Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation.

With mere good intentions hell is proverbially paved.

Strength is a facade for the proud, weakness is a mask for the lazy.

A paradise of inward tranquility seems to be faith's usual result.

Evil is a disease; and worry over disease is itself an additional form of disease, which only adds to the original complaint.

We are stereotyped creatures, imitators and copiers of our past selves.

An educated memory depends on an organized system of associations; and its goodness depends on two of their peculiarities: first, on the persistency of the associations; and, second, on their number.

Our beliefs are really rules for action.

There's nothing so absurd that if you repeat it often enough, people will believe it.

We must not just patch and tinker with life. We must keep renewing it. Embrace novelty and uniqueness.

All religions begin with the cry Help.

As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use.

Science as such assuredly has no authority, for she can only say what is, not what is not.

We are mere bundles of habits.

The war against war is going to be no holiday excursion or camping party.

It is so human a book that I don't see how belief in its divine authority can survive the reading of it.

Life shall be built in doing and suffering and creating.

There are two lives, the natural and the spiritual, and we must lose the one before we can participate in the other.

We are proud of a human nature that could be so passionately extreme, but we shrink from advising others to follow the example.

Asceticism may be a mere expression of organic hardihood, disgusted with too much ease.

We believe as much as we can. We would believe everything if we could.

Religion, whatever it is, is a man's total reaction upon life.

Serious development of the personality begins at the closet door.

How many of us persist in a precipitate course which, but for a moment of heedlessness we might never have entered upon, simply because we hate to change our minds.

Faith branches off the highroad before reason begins

In its broadest term, religion says that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in rightful relations to it.

[Religion is] the attempt to be in harmony with an unseen order of things.

Modern man . . . has not ceased to be credulous . . . the need to believe haunts him.

Hogamus, higamous Man is polygamous Higamus, hogamous Woman monogamous.

The truth remains that, after adolescence has begun, "words, words, words," must constitute a large part, and an always larger part as life advances, of what the human being has to learn.

Far from being antecedent principles that animate the process, law, language, truth are but abstract names for its results.

It seems the natural thing for us to listen whilst the Europeans talk.

The work that leads to a doctor's degree is a constant temptation to sacrifice one's growth as a man to one's growth as a specialist.

An experience, perceptual or conceptual, must conform to reality in order to be true

The difference between objective and subjective extension is one of relation to a context solely.