William James Quotes
Every way of classifying a thing is but a way of handling it for some particular purpose.
Our life is always deeper than we know, is always more divine than it seems, and hence we are able to survive degradations and despairs which otherwise must engulf us.
We have nothing to do but to receive, resting absolutely upon the merit, power, and love of our Redeemer.
Organization and method mean much, but contagious human characters mean more in a university.
My thinking is first and last and always for the sake of my doing, and I can only do one thing at a time.
Woe to him whose beliefs play fast and loose with the order which realities follow in his experience; they will lead him nowhere or else make false connections
There is no being capable of a spiritual life who does not have within him a jungle. Where the wolf constantly HOWLS and the OBSCENE bird of night chatters endlessly.
Science can tell us what exists; but to compare the worths, both of what exists and of what does not exist, we must consult not science, but what Pascal calls our heart.
It is astonishing how many mental operations we can explain when we have once grasped the principles of association
The true'to put it very briefly, is only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as 'the right' is only the expedient in the way of our behaving.
An idea will infect another with its own emotional interest when they have become both associated together into any sort of a mental total.
All of our life is but a mass of small habits - practical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual - that bear us irresistibly toward our destiny.
The general law is that no mental modification ever occurs which is not accompanied or followed by a bodily change.
The desire to gain wealth and the fear to lose it are our chief breeders of cowardice and propagators of corruption.
Faith is one of the forces by which men live, and the total absence of it means collapse
The old question of whether there is design is idle. The real question is what is the world, whether or not it have a designer--and that can be revealed only by the study of all nature's particulars.
Divinity lies all around us, but society remains too hidebound to accept that fact...The mother sea and the fountain-head of all religions lies in the mystical experiences of the individual.
There must always be a discrepncy between concepts and reality, because the former are static and discontinuous while the latter is dynamic and flowing
The God of many men is little more than their court of appeal against the damnatory judgment passed on their failures by the opinion of the world.
The greatest empiricists among us are only empiricists on reflection: when left to their instincts, they dogmatize like infallible popes.
A good hypothesis in science must have other properties than those of the phenomenon it is immediately invoked to explain, otherwise it is not prolific enough.
Marvelous as may be the power of my dog to understand my moods, deathless as his affection and fidelity, his mental state is as unsolved a mystery to me as it was to my remotest ancestor.
There can be no final truth in ethics any more than in physics, until the last man has had his experience and said his say.
Ninety-nine hundredths or, possibly, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths of our activity is purely automatic and habitual, from our rising in the morning to our lying down each night.
Our colleges ought to have lit up in us a lasting relish for a better kind of man, a loss of appetite for mediocrities.
To give the theory plenty of 'rope' and see if it hangs itself eventually is better tactics than to choke it off at the outset b abstract accusations of self-contradiction
So to feel brave, act as if we were brave, use all our will to that end...and a courage-fit will very likely replace the fit of fear.
The subjectivist in morals, when his moral feelings are at war with the facts about him, is always free to seek harmony by toningdown the sensitiveness of the feelings.
